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  • 17 hours ago
World leader in Earth observation made in Europe: Small satellites from Finland see everything

EU governments are eager to work with ICEYE. The Finnish space company sells mini satellites that help allied nations safeguard their sovereignty. That’s because when it comes to Earth observation and military reconnaissance, the high-resolution radar eyes in space are second to none.

READ MORE : http://www.euronews.com/2026/05/15/world-leader-in-earth-observation-made-in-europe-small-satellites-from-finland-see-everyth

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00:00Two young Genies from Poland and Finland have built the best satellite system in the world.
00:07From 600 kilometers high, we observe the eyes of the radar, through deep clouds, and in the night really everything.
00:15All of them, all of them, all of them, all of them, all of them, all of them, all of
00:18them, all of them.
00:21The world of the Earth, made in Europe.
00:30Ein finnischer Sumpf in einem Außenbezirk von Helsinki.
00:35Hier liegt die Zentrale von IceEye.
00:37Das Startup produziert Schwärme aus Mini-Satelliten und ist Weltmarktführer.
00:43Radartechniker Andrea aus Italien zeigt seinem türkischen Kollegen Burak und der Laborantin Kriti aus Nepal den Testraum.
00:50Der neue Satellit ist streng geheim, Filmen verboten.
00:55Okay, so Hans, in here, we've got our model of the satellite.
01:00Wow, great stuff! This looks amazing!
01:04It's a radar satellite?
01:05A radar? Radar.
01:06So it looks through the clouds during the night?
01:09Precisely.
01:10But this satellite is much smaller than what's traditionally been available.
01:15This is about 200 kilos.
01:16Being small, it still has high performance, less in cost.
01:23And that means you can have a fleet of them.
01:26You can have four, five, ten, rather than just one.
01:29So it's not just one satellite, but it's a constellation of satellites.
01:33Exactly, and that's what IceEye has.
01:35We have the world's largest constellation of these satellites.
01:38What they can see down there on Earth.
01:41So the highest resolution that we currently offer is 25 centimeter.
01:45So they are up there 600 kilometers and they can see objects just this size.
01:51Yeah, exactly.
01:52We are going to move that to 16 centimeter and it's going to keep going even further.
01:56We can deliver images within two or three hours and we're going to push that down to sub 10 minutes.
02:02What's the number actually of satellites you have up there right now?
02:05We've launched 70 today.
02:08We are currently producing 25 per year and we'll be moving to 50 per year.
02:16One satellite each week. That's amazing.
02:31IceEye wurde 2014 gegründet.
02:34Startkapital gab es von der Europäischen Union.
02:37Das Unternehmen hat Ableger in Polen, Spanien, Deutschland und Griechenland
02:40und beschäftigt 1000 Menschen aus 70 Ländern.
02:44Im vergangenen Jahr machte IceEye einen Umsatz von 250 Millionen Euro.
02:49Pekka Laudila ist einer der Gründer.
02:51Hi Pekka.
02:52Hey.
02:52Nice to meet you.
02:54Good to meet you.
02:54Come on in.
02:55Yeah, great.
02:56I'm curious to learn about your experience.
02:58Sure.
02:59How did it start, once upon a time?
03:03Well, we were in this university here, in Aalto University.
03:07The story of IceEye, of course, is in the very extreme that we did set out to do this, you
03:14know,
03:14imaging radar sensor in microsatellite scale, which had never been done in the world.
03:18Uh, which again for, you know, us being a couple 24 year old students, you know, was ambitious stretch.
03:26Made in Europe, can we still compete on a global level?
03:31Deep tech research based companies.
03:34There, there's a lot that, that Europe has, has, you know, very, very, very strong background there.
03:39I think it's always been a little bit of a challenge to grow those companies as fast and as aggressively
03:45as, you know, you might in US or you might in China.
03:49When it comes to European Union, what is your direct advice to Brussels?
03:53Go for our ball plans rather now than in 10 years.
03:57Europe actually does have resources, but, you know, being able to put them in specific programs with the ambition that
04:05you actually try to be the world's best.
04:08You know, be serious about it.
04:09Gleich um die Ecke liegt Aalto, die beste Universität Finnlands. 14.000 junge Menschen aus aller Welt studieren hier.
04:17Mit seinem Nanosatelliten-Programm hat Professor Jan Prax weltweit für Schlagzeilen gesorgt.
04:23Nice to meet you.
04:24Glad to meet you. So let's go to that.
04:26Yeah, I'm curious to learn. Looking forward for it.
04:29Our goal was to build the first satellite for the nation.
04:33And this really great goal attracted exceptional students.
04:38We were building successfully the first satellite for Finland.
04:41And these very successful and talented students were going much further and creating many other success stories later on.
04:49And we are still successfully spinning out companies on technology and space technology.
04:55Our latest startup company started just a few weeks ago.
04:59We have very long living funding programs for the very beginning of the innovation chain.
05:07170 Firmen logieren auf dem Campus.
05:10Aus Forschern werden Jungunternehmer.
05:1230 Milliarden Euro, das ist der Wert der von Aalto Studenten gegründeten Unternehmen.
05:1715.000 Arbeitsplätze wurden so geschaffen.
05:19Made by Aalto.
05:21Doktorand Marius aus Deutschland bewirbt sich gerade bei IceEye.
05:26What we are doing at Aalto is we are building the satellite from scratch.
05:30And then we fly them into space.
05:32As a student or as a worker here, you are experiencing the real stuff.
05:39And of course this makes a different attitude towards building a company, building a startup or actually knowing what you
05:46are doing, right?
05:48Egal ob Kapital gebraucht wird für Studenten-Startups oder Kontakte in die Geschäftswelt,
05:53der Vizepräsident von Aalto hat direkte Telefonnummern von Top-Managern in ganz Europa.
06:00European Universities around, what they can learn from you, what can they learn from Finland?
06:06We are coaching our teams in the way that they get feedback from customers, stakeholders.
06:15So we start from day one that we get customers in the boat in the very first minute.
06:19One very important thing is the culture and the trust.
06:24And the third factor is the low hierarchy.
06:28Astrophysikerin Shae Strong leitet die Datenauswertung bei IceEye.
06:32Die Superbilder aus dem All helfen bei der militärischen Fernaufklärung, aber auch beim Katastrophenmanagement.
06:38Wo brennt es? Welche Gebiete wurden überschwemmt? Wo wird der Urwald abgeholzt?
06:42IceEye hat den Überblick.
06:44What was the feeling when you saw the first picture from your new satellite coming in?
06:50Oh, it's always pretty exciting.
06:52It's like a quiet revolution.
06:54It almost becomes like an infrastructure.
06:57You have this amazing, beautiful access to all this information quite frequently.
07:02So we can really impact people when it comes to disaster recovery or border security.
07:13Is the work that we're doing at IceEye useful for humanity?
07:16And I would say yes.
07:17We're not generating pictures or information or data just for consumer goods, for instance.
07:26But we are actually capturing what is happening on Earth.
07:29The drive for me is devoting my time in a way that's hopefully making the world ultimately a better place
07:37through data.
07:37So with this information we can make better decisions for Europe as we navigate through this changing environment, this changing
07:47world.
07:47And we have the information we have publicly figured out No matter how we can make it.
07:59Let's make a new item that doesn't like use of social assaults.
07:59We need it forqi people and people's cameras and our cameras.
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