A Family-Owned German Satellite Company Wants to Launch Rockets as Well

Since the 1980s, a small German company called OHB SE has built hundreds of satellites for clients ranging from the German army to scientific researchers. Within two years, OHB plans to send satellites into orbit with its own rockets—putting it into competition with giants such as NASA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Airbus, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. “Without rockets, satellites are useless,” says Marco Fuchs, OHB’s chief executive officer.

With satellites becoming ever smaller, Fuchs sees an opportunity for OHB to be a one-stop shop that builds spacecraft for customers and then places them in the sky. And the company has some experience manufacturing rocket parts as a subcontractor for the European Ariane carrier rocket. The potential is huge, with thousands of satellites planned for launch in the coming decade. Operators of small satellites often find themselves at the mercy of launch-services providers, which tend to place them on a sort of orbital standby list, frequently bumped by bigger—and more lucrative—cargo, and whose rockets often blast off from difficult-to-reach spaceports in places such as Kazakhstan or French Guiana.