PARIS \u2014 Finland\u2019s ICEYE expects to double global production to 100 radar satellites by the end of 2027, the company told Defense News in a clarification of comments by CEO Rafal Modrzewski at a defense-industry conference in Brussels on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
ICEYE is currently manufacturing satellites at a pace of 50 per year, Modrzewski said at the European Defence & Security Summit in the Belgian capital, and the goal is to ramp up production to two satellites a week as the company responds to surging demand from European militaries.<\/p>\n
The CEO said future constellations will be \u201cin the hundreds of satellites,\u201d pointing to the example of Elon Musk\u2019s Starlink with its thousands of satellites. He said ICEYE\u2019s planned manufacturing line for 100 satellites a year \u201cis still too small, so we will keep on growing that production.\u201d<\/p>\n
European governments are trying to reduce their dependency on the United States for a number of critical defense enablers, including satellite intelligence, and ICEYE has benefited from efforts to close the gap. The company has said the U.S. halt of intelligence sharing in March 2025 really drove home the need in Europe for sovereign access to space-based intel<\/a>.<\/p>\n The ICEYE CEO said Germany\u2019s order<\/a> for a 40-satellite constellation in December was \u201cthe first-ever European move to actually create a properly large tactical system in Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n The company was founded in 2014 by Modrzewski and Pekka Laurila as a Finnish university spin-off, and it supplies Earth-observation data using synthetic aperture radar, or SAR for short, which ICEYE initially intended as a tool to help ships avoid sea ice.<\/p>\n ICEYE took less than 12 months from contract signature to deliver full radar-satellite systems to Poland, Greece and Portugal, according to Modrzewski, calling that a big change in an industry where one satellite used to take five years.<\/p>\n \u201cHere we are talking about three different countries, each of which has received a constellation of five, six, seven within less than 12 months,\u201d the CEO said. \u201cThose are off-the-shelf satellites, that\u2019s how crazy it got right now. And it is what we need in order to be responsive to the threats that are outside of our borders.\u201d<\/p>\n Modrzewski said the cost of an ICEYE system is ten times lower than that of legacy systems, allowing the likes of Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands to own not just satellites but entire constellations.<\/p>\n He said ICEYE has delivered a four-satellite system to the Polish Armed Forces, adding that the country is continuing to grow its constellation, \u201cand soon they will have high tactical capability which is fully sovereign to Poland.\u201d The Finnish company signed an agreement<\/a> in May 2025 to provide Poland with three SAR satellites, with an option for three more.<\/p>\n Modrzewski has been pushing a proposal for a system of 1,000 satellites called Constellation Europe that would combine space-based ground observation, space situational awareness and in-space defense capabilities. He said access to space-based surveillance to \u201cknow, react or act\u201d has been a common thread in recent conflicts, and a capability that Europe is still missing.<\/p>\n \u201cThe war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East, they differ in many ways, but they actually are extremely similar in the fact that the tactical access to satellite intelligence has proven to be critical for both sides,\u201d Modrzewski said.<\/p>\n With a growing number of countries such as India, Japan and Australia trying to move away from a purely U.S.-based supply chain, there is \u201ca massive opportunity for our European defense sector\u201d as long as European firms can show credibility in their home markets, according to Modrzewski.<\/p>\n He said Constellation Europe would be a way for the European space industry to show it produces \u201ccapabilities which are equal or better to our counterparts,\u201d and is happy share those capabilities to contribute to a \u201cbigger, safer world\u201d of middle powers.<\/p>\n He said Europe was previously able to jointly procured a satellite-navigation system with Galileo, and now needs to do the same for Earth observation.<\/p>\n \u201cif we really want to catch up to this massive gap that\u2019s developing between us and the United States, when it comes to space, we\u2019ve got to start moving fast and acting now,\u201d the ICEYE CEO said.<\/p>\n