Caelum spent Tuesday 21 July at the Farnborough International Airshow, which ran from 20 to 24 July 2026. No meetings were booked in advance. The purpose was to walk the halls and the chalet line and talk to the people who finance aircraft, because their methods are the ones Caelum applies to satellites.
The four questions
Every conversation with an aircraft lessor or aviation bank followed the same path once the word "satellite" came up.
What is the residual? Aviation runs on appraised values, half-life adjustments and decades of secondary-market data. Space has none of that yet: no standardised residual value guides, no appraiser community equivalent to ISTAT. The honest answer is to underwrite to contracted cash flow and treat residual as upside, closer to how lessors priced regional jets in the 1990s than to how they price an A320neo today.
How do you repossess it? The aviation answer is physical: take the aircraft, file a flight plan, fly it to a neutral jurisdiction. A satellite cannot be flown anywhere, but it cannot do anything at all without the ground station telling it to. Control of the telemetry, tracking and command chain is constructive possession, and that chain sits on land under an ordinary contract. Most lessors accepted this quickly; it is the same logic as holding security over the engines and the maintenance records.
Who insures it? Launch and in-orbit cover exists and is priced per asset. Caelum takes no launch exposure on any structure; the lease begins at in-orbit delivery or at the manufacturer, so the cover that matters is in-orbit life.
Who is the lessee? Operators with contracted transponder or capacity revenue, and ground infrastructure owners with long-term service agreements. The credit analysis is the airline analysis with different nouns.
The space content at Farnborough
Farnborough's Space Zone, one of the show's standing features, sits in one of the site's sound stages, with a Space Zone Theatre carrying a conference programme across the five days. The organiser's topics included UK government updates, space infrastructure, domain awareness, navigation, debris management, Earth observation, governance and funding. It is a small room beside the aviation halls, and that is the point: the space industry is still a guest at the aviation industry's table, with something to learn about how the hosts fund their fleets.
Why an airshow rather than a space conference
The people who will fund satellite sale-leaseback at scale are in aviation, shipping and infrastructure, with balance sheets built for long-lived, insured, contracted assets. Meeting them where they already are beats waiting for them to arrive at a satellite show. The aviation-to-orbit argument is Caelum's founding premise; Farnborough is where it gets tested against the people who know the original model best.
If we spoke on the day and you want to pick the thread up, get in touch.