From Thales Alenia Space to D-Orbit, the space race also speaks Italian

Italy in the space field has a tradition dating back to 1964, when the San Marco satellite made us the third country to go into orbit, after the USSR and the USA. Today, we have practically the entire space chain, from launching to satellite construction to communication with Telespazio, which incidentally at the time showed us live coverage of the very first moon landing.

Funding today is at an all-time high: between national, European and Pnrr funds there are 7.3 billion up to 2026, we are in fifth place in the world in terms of the ratio of funding to GDP. The recent bill presented by the government also brings order to the field, with rules for access to space, registers and, importantly, a reserve in the works to be allocated to SMEs in the sector, to help them grow.

Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between France's Thales and Italy's Leonardo, is at work in the new race to the Moon. It can draw on the experience gained from building half of the habitable surface of the International Space Station, Iss, which it is now pouring into its collaboration with Axiom, the private company that is building the station that will replace the Iss. Today, Thales Alenia Space is building important parts of the space station that will go around the Moon, as the arrival and departure point for astronauts and materials, and, above all, it is building the first lunar dwelling, a jewel of astronautical engineering, almost a perfectly organised bivouac just a few metres long that will be able to shelter the first humans at work on our natural satellite from the terrible cosmic rays.

"The Moon, however, we also see it in Nasa's perspective as the first step for a future leap to Mars," says Massimo Comparini, CEO of Thales Alenia Space, who also shows optimism for the Exomars robot mission to the red planet and for the forthcoming European tender for the construction of the lunar lander to which the old continent aspires.

From Italy to the USA, D-Orbit, a company from Fino Mornasco, Como, which has grown a lot in recent years around the concept, which it practically invented, of space logistics, has gone from Italy to the USA in recent weeks. ION, a sort of container-bus for small and medium-sized satellites, is D-Orbit's piece de resistance. Once launched, it is capable of releasing satellites even one at a time, moving in the different orbits prescribed for them, with great precision and obvious savings compared to the traditional system of releasing all the satellites of a constellation together and then moving them individually to reach the correct orbit. The Starlink constellation, for example, does this by releasing trains of dozens of satellites all together.