This Friday marks 64 years since NASA put the Telstar 1, the first commercial telecommunications satellite, into orbit. Currently, 10,413 Starlink satellites, Elon Musk's company, fly over our heads. In contrast, the European Union, which has been talking about strategic autonomy in telecommunications for years, has not yet launched any from its flagship project. The difference explains where we are in 2026 in satellite connectivity.

Sateliot appeared at the center of Catalan public life in 2021, thanks to InfoK. The company, created three years earlier by a group of veterans from the telecommunications industry, was one of those responsible for Enxaneta, the first Catalan nanosatellite. At that time, it was still difficult to explain the idea of going to space to connect to the Internet of Things and send one message a day to receiving devices. Half a decade later, the company is already an aerospace benchmark, and aspires to fill space with 5G connectivity satellites for security forces, defense units, and strategic infrastructures. The executive director, Jaume Sanpera, receives Empreses in the company's brand new offices to talk about dual-use technologies, satellite constellations, and how to become friends with Elon Musk again.

Pere Mier (Figueres, 1952), a prominent figure in the technology world, with origins in the family business Mier Comunicacions and former president of employers' associations Ametic and Proespacio, among other roles, has been president for a few days of Open Cosmos, the company founded by a Majorcan, Rafel Jordà, and two Catalans, Aleix Megías and Jordi Barrera, and dedicated to the design, production, and operation of satellites. Mier explains from the company's headquarters in the Sant Andreu neighborhood of Barcelona that his role will consist of consolidating a group that is "among the fastest growing in Europe," based on "the democratization of access to space" to make it easier and cheaper. He adds that he will also play a role in the development of the defense and security industry within the Old Continent's objective of gaining strategic autonomy, because "space technologies are dual by definition."

A few years ago, when people talked about the space economy, it sounded like a distant concept. Not only because of the physical distance, but also because it was difficult to imagine what launching small satellites to send data or connect devices from space could possibly offer. Now, at a historical moment marked by investment in defense—or war, as the President of the United States likes to call it—it's all starting to make sense.

We often ask ourselves what kind of country we want. It is a pertinent and necessary question, and one that has many answers. One of them would most certainly have to do with scientific ambition, behind which there are a number of virtues: it calls for a high level of education, it helps to make innovation possible in companies and therefore to create wealth, and it drives concrete solutions to improve our quality of life. Scientific projects are an engine of progress. The first Catalan nanosatellite, the Enxaneta, lifted off this Monday morning, after two postponements. It culminates a two-year work and is the first of the six nanosatellites that the Generalitat plans to activate in a first phase that will last between three and four years. To speak, as has been said at some point, of the Catalan NASA is laughable. But the project itself must be taken very seriously. If only there were more initiatives of this calibre. The Enxaneta is part of Catalonia's NewSpace Strategy, which aims to place Catalonia in the new space economy as a sector of opportunities to improve the economy and services on Earth.