Caelum Space Leasing spent the week of 23 to 26 March 2026 at SATELLITE 2026, the SATShow, in Washington, DC.
The show gathered operators, satellite and ground-segment manufacturers, launch providers and financiers from across the global space economy. For a platform built to finance space infrastructure the way aircraft and ships have long been financed, it was the right room to be in, and we used the week to listen rather than to pitch.
A few themes ran through most of our conversations. Operators are looking harder at sale-leaseback as an alternative to holding assets on balance sheet, and the questions were practical ones about residual value, lease tenor and how the structure sits against existing debt. Ground-segment owners raised the cost of building and refreshing teleports and gateways, and where third-party capital might carry some of that weight. The funding of Europe's IRIS² ground segment came up more than once, both as a sovereignty question and as an asset-finance one.
What stood out was how familiar the underlying problem is. Long-life capital assets, contracted cash flows and operators who would rather deploy capital into their core business than tie it up in infrastructure. That is the territory aviation and maritime finance has worked in for decades, and the case for bringing the same discipline to space, structured through an Irish S.110 vehicle, landed well with the people we spoke to.
If you were in Washington, or you would like to take any of these threads further, get in touch.