Caelum Space Leasing spent two days at Space-Comm Expo Europe, ExCeL London, on 4–5 March 2026.
The show is one of Europe's larger gatherings of the space industry, bringing operators, manufacturers, launch and ground-segment companies, agencies and investors under one roof. For a lessor applying aviation and maritime finance structures to space infrastructure, it was the right room to be in, and the conversations across the two days bore that out.
Ground-segment funding came up repeatedly. Teleports, gateways and antenna estates are real assets with long economic lives, yet they still tend to sit on operators' balance sheets by default rather than by design. Several conversations turned on the same question we built Caelum to answer: whether a sale-leaseback can release that capital and let operators put it back into the network. The case for treating ground infrastructure the way aviation treats aircraft was easier to make in person than on paper.
Two further themes ran through the floor. European space sovereignty, and the IRIS² ground segment in particular, gave the funding discussion a policy backdrop that was hard to ignore. And the appetite for institutional asset-finance discipline, from Irish S.110 structuring through to documentation and credit, was stronger than we expected among operators who have grown up owning their hardware outright.
We came to listen, and we left with a clearer read on where European capital and space infrastructure are starting to meet. If any of these themes are live for you, start a conversation with us.