The Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt), Germany’s independent competition authority, has approved a new joint venture between Rheinmetall and OHB. In a 16 April announcement, the Bundeskartellamt explained that the new subsidiary will be used to bid for a German armed forces public procurement contract.
In September 2025, the German government announced that it had committed €35 billion in spending for space-related defence projects by 2030. At the time, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius explained that, as part of the package, the country planned to “build new satellite constellations for early warning, reconnaissance, and communications.”
On 10 December 2025, a contract for the first of these constellations was awarded, with Helsing and Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace selected to build and deploy a “substantial number of small satellites” into low Earth orbit for space-based intelligence and surveillance applications. Shortly after, a second contract for a reconnaissance constellation was awarded to a different Rheinmetall joint venture. The German armed forces awarded a €1.7 billion contract to Rheinmetall ICEYE Space Solutions, which was formed in November 2025 when Rheinmetall partnered with Finnish satellite manufacturer and Earth observation data provider ICEYE.
Reports of Rheinmetall considering a separate joint venture with OHB to bid for a German armed forces public procurement contract surfaced in early January 2026, with OHB confirming the reports in a 26 January announcement. On 16 April, the Bundeskartellamt revealed that efforts toward the joint venture had moved forward, with the country’s national antitrust authority approving its creation.
“Rheinmetall Digital and OHB operate in different sectors. They aim to combine their expertise in order to jointly submit a bid as a consortium,” said Bundeskartellamt President Andreas Mundt. “There are no competition concerns regarding the creation of the joint venture.”
In its announcement, the Bundeskartellamt explained that the joint venture would focus on “expanding military satellite communications.” This would cover a second of the three primary satellite constellation types outlined by Defence Minister Pistorius in September 2025.
Within the new joint venture, the Bundeskartellamt revealed that OHB would be responsible for the space segment and the associated ground segment, while Rheinmetall Digital, a Rheinmetall subsidiary, would focus on the user and network segments, including end-user terminals.
While Germany moves toward selecting a prime contractor for a secure communications constellation, European officials are warning against fragmentation.
“In this moment of rapid change, there is a critical need to synchronise European initiatives by aligning space for defence competencies, avoiding duplication and pooling resources for scale,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher explained at the Space for European Resilience conference in 2025. “We still remain too fragmented to guarantee Europe with genuine, comprehensive and autonomous space resilience. We have an opportunity to change that, and we must.”
In January 2026, the European Commission launched an initial satellite-based secure communications service called GOVSATCOM that pooled capacity for existing resources. Germany is not among the five countries contributing capacity to this initial service, with France, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Luxembourg making up the group. The service is, however, only a precursor to the European Union’s more capable IRIS2 offering.
The SpaceRISE consortium was awarded a €10.55 billion contract in late 2025 to build the multi-orbit IRIS2 secure communications constellation, which will include approximately 290 satellites. The first launch of an IRIS2 satellite is expected before the end of the decade, with an initial service expected to be operational by 2030.
Questions about whether Europe as a whole would be better positioned if all resources were contributed to a single centralised project do, however, persist.
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