The 6th European Space Forum ran in Brussels on 30 June and 1 July 2026 under the title "Urgency and Ambition: Europe at a Crossroads". The agenda had three items that mattered to a lessor: the EU Space Act, sovereignty, and how a political commitment becomes an operating capability. Caelum attended both days.
Sovereignty is a demand profile
Most of the Forum treated sovereignty as a policy objective. It is also a description of a customer. A government that decides it must have secure connectivity, independent Earth observation or its own launch access is committing to buy that capability for a long time, from suppliers it can hold to account, under terms that survive a change of administration. That is what an offtake contract looks like.
The financing consequence follows directly. Long-dated, public-sector-anchored demand is the kind of revenue that supports asset-level capital. Aviation reached investment-grade lease structures in Ireland on the back of airline capacity commitments that were shorter and less certain than a sovereign connectivity mandate. If Europe means what it said in Brussels, the satellites, gateways and control facilities that deliver on it are lendable assets with an identifiable tenant, and the question becomes who holds them and on what terms. Caelum's answer is a Section 110 DAC per deal, holding title and leasing the asset back to the operator; the structures are set out on our services page.
IRIS² is mostly on the ground
IRIS² dominated the connectivity sessions, and the discussion centred on the constellation. From a financing seat the more interesting part sits at ground level. A multi-orbit sovereign network needs gateway earth stations, a secure control segment and the terrestrial links between them, all of which are fixed assets in named EU jurisdictions with planning files, licences and twenty-year-plus lives. They can be owned separately from the spacecraft, secured conventionally and financed with tools an infrastructure lender already uses.
We have argued before that the ground segment is where space leasing starts, because it is where the security package is strongest. IRIS² is the largest single test of that argument in Europe, and the ground estate it requires will need capital from somewhere other than the programme budget.
The EU Space Act as enforcement infrastructure
The Space Act was presented mainly as a regulatory framework: common rules on safety, resilience and sustainability for operators serving the EU market. For a financier its value is different. A lessor underwriting a satellite today relies on domestic security law, licence conditions and contract, because the international regime for space assets is thin. A harmonised EU licensing and registration layer narrows that gap. It gives a creditor a consistent answer, across 27 member states, to questions about who is authorised to operate an asset, what happens to that authorisation on default, and what end-of-life obligations attach to it.
Rules that are consistent and enforceable are a precondition for standardised documentation, and standardised documentation is what lets a financing market scale. Aviation had Cape Town; space in Europe may, in practice, get a good part of the way there through the Act before the Berlin Protocol ever enters into force.
Turning commitment into capability
The Forum's framing question was how Europe converts political will into operating hardware. The answer is procurement plus capital. Agencies and the Commission can specify and anchor demand; the assets will be built and, increasingly, owned by the private sector, so the capital stack has to be designed as carefully as the payload. If you were in Brussels and want to continue the conversation, get in touch.