Who buys space in Europe

The contracts come from TED, the official journal for public procurement in the European Union, read through its public search API. I searched for space terms in seven languages and kept contract award notices published from January 2024, the electronic format that names the winning supplier. Notices that name no winner, or whose buyer is outside Europe, are left out. Each remaining notice was then read to decide whether the purchase itself concerns satellites, spacecraft, launch, ground infrastructure or data from space. A notice that only mentions a space organisation, or uses a space word in a name, is left out.

This is not the whole market. Intergovernmental organisations such as ESA buy through their own systems and appear only where they published on TED. Purchases below the EU publication thresholds, contracts in the United Kingdom, and notices from before 2024 are not included. A notice can name several winners, for example in a framework with several lots. Counts are per award notice: some buyers, notably in Romania, publish a new notice for each contract under a framework agreement, so one framework can appear several times. In notices with several winners from different countries, TED does not link each country to a named winner, so the map, the country filter and the cross-border share use the set of supplier countries recorded for each notice, and some winners are shown without a country. Values are rounded for display and are often ceilings rather than amounts paid; placeholder values of one euro or less are not shown. One published value of EUR 3 billion for an INRAE data-supply contract is also not shown because it appears implausible; no error has been confirmed, and the value as published can be seen in the notice on TED.

Every notice was coded twice, independently, by two AI models working from the same written rules. They agreed on 97.6% of the decisions to include or exclude a notice (Cohen's kappa 0.92). Where they disagreed and at least one of them included the notice, 74 notices in all, a third, blind reading made the final decision. Each contract in the lists links to its notice on TED. Corrections are welcome.

Source: van de Haar, H. (2026). Who buys space in Europe. The Demand Side. Data: TED, Publications Office of the European Union.