The 80-year-old bearings maker and the US-listed satellite firm have signed an MoU to industrialise Spire’s 100-satellite-a-year Munich plant for European defence customers.
Schaeffler AG, the German precision-engineering company best known for the bearings inside almost every aircraft engine and Ariane rocket, has signed a memorandum of understanding with US-listed satellite firm Spire Global to develop space hardware and satellite platforms manufactured in Germany.
The pairing, announced on Tuesday, is aimed squarely at the sovereign-European-space-capacity market that Brussels and Berlin have spent the past 18 months trying to spin up.The partnership combines two complementary positions.
Schaeffler brings 80 years of precision-bearings manufacturing, an existing aerospace supply chain into Boeing, Airbus and the Ariane rocket family, and serious industrial scale-up capacity.
Spire brings flight heritage from a satellite constellation that has flown for more than a decade, the platform architecture that comes with it, and a 100-satellite-a-year manufacturing footprint already standing up in Munich.
