The Parisian startup ARCSPACE has just announced that it has raised more than 2 million euros to qualify in flight an electron beam welding and cutting technology intended for operations in orbit. Its ambition is to work on satellites which were never designed to be maintained. Behind this technical prowess lies a still embryonic market, that of orbital servicing.
Having made its launchers reusable, the space industry is now tackling another anomaly in its economic model, satellites which can be worth several hundred million euros, remain, essentially, impossible to repair once in orbit.
Whether it is a breakdown, fuel exhaustion or damage, numerous incidents are enough to condemn an asset although a large part of its functions remain operational. The problem takes on another dimension as telecommunications, navigation, financial transactions, logistics and defense depend on these orbital infrastructures.
“The space industry has traditionally operated under a single-use model. When equipment broke down or a satellite ran out of fuel, infrastructure worth several hundred million euros was lost,” summarizes Guillaume Mohara, CEO and co-founder of ARCSPACE.
Founded in 2022 in Paris, ARCSPACE has just raised more than 2 million euros during a round led by DEPO Ventures, via its DEPO Ventures One fund, with SCE Freiraum Ventures, IRDI Capital Investissement and a French network of business angels.
Transforming an industrial process into a spatial tool
Thus, ARCSPACE is developing compact equipment using a high-energy electron beam to cut, join and weld materials in a vacuum. Electron beam welding is not new. The challenge is to miniaturize it, make it autonomous and qualify it for the constraints of space: vibrations at launch, high vacuum, extreme temperatures, operation without direct human intervention.
Making a satellite that was not serviceable
If some of the future satellites will be designed from the outset to be refueled, inspected or modified in orbit. Assets already in service, and more broadly all those which have never been equipped with an interface designed to accommodate a maintenance vehicle, pose a problem.
ARCSPACE specifically wants to intervene on this unprepared fleet. Its technology must make it possible to physically create or modify an interface on the satellite, rather than requiring that it be integrated from manufacturing.
“ARCSPACE offers a disruptive solution capable of repairing satellites that were never designed to be maintained,” said Petr Šíma, Partner at DEPO Ventures, for whom this capacity can reduce the risk associated with orbital infrastructures and strengthen their resilience.
Its first market will therefore be less that of “repair” in the automotive sense of the term than that of serviceability: making an asset which was not previously available accessible for intervention.
A market whose economy remains to be built
The potential for orbital servicing regularly amounts to tens of billions of euros. The European Space Policy Institute lists projections ranging from 5.1 to nearly 7 billion dollars for the global OSAM market by 2030, and above all highlights its lack of commercial maturity.
Some operations have nevertheless begun to validate the economic principle of life extension. ESPI estimates, for example, that Northrop Grumman’s first commercial MEV mission allowed Intelsat to preserve several hundred million dollars of value, for a much lower servicing cost. But MEV-1 and MEV-2 have long remained exceptions rather than the starting point for a mass market.
The dynamic is accelerating with in July 2026, SpaceLogistics’ Mission Robotic Vehicle, equipped with the RSGS robotic system developed with DARPA, was launched to carry out complex interventions on geostationary satellites and install modules capable of extending their lifespan.
The ARCSPACE market depends less on the total number of satellites than on how much the lifespan recovered is worth, compared to the full cost of the intervention. For a low-value asset, sending a servicing vehicle makes little sense. For a geostationary satellite worth several hundred million euros and still capable of generating several years of revenue, the calculation changes in nature.
To date, ARCSPACE says it has already attracted interest from more than a dozen commercial companies and is working with CNES, ESA and the European Defense Fund.
ARCSPACE is not alone in wanting to weld in space
In May 2024, the American ThinkOrbital and the British TWI carried out autonomous electron beam welding in space. The experiment, launched aboard a Falcon 9, produced a sample then brought back to Earth and analyzed in particular by the ESA. TWI presents it as the first autonomous welding ever carried out in space.
For its part, ARCSPACE, plans in 2027 an operation of “more than 100 seconds of fully autonomous welding”
Furthermore, players like ASTROSCALE are developing the rendezvous, approach, inspection, capture and life extension capabilities necessary for the emergence of orbital servicing; the company itself considers Rendezvous, Proximity Operations and Docking as the prerequisite for any maintenance operation.
Companies which are not necessarily competitors of ARCSPACE: they can become its partners, or even its clients, if they choose to integrate its effector into their platforms.
Between welding and repair, an entire chain remains to be built
A tool capable of welding in a vacuum is not enough to repair a satellite; you must first reach the asset, move nearby without collision, identify it, stabilize it, possibly capture it, diagnose the fault, then carry out the intervention.
Added to these physical difficulties are the cost of the vehicle, launch, ground operations, authorizations, liability and insurance.
What happens if an operation supposed to save a 200 million euro satellite instead causes its permanent loss? Who guarantees the intervention? Who bears the risk? Under what conditions will an insurer accept a third party to approach an asset it covers?
One of the challenges is to develop a solution which must be part of a sufficiently reliable and economical servicing chain for the operator to prefer intervention to satellite replacement.
This dependence is both the weakness and the opportunity of ARCSPACE; if the startup does not control all of this infrastructure, it can become a common supplier to several operators.
Another question arises in the longer term. The more new satellites are designed with standardized interfaces, the less it will be necessary to artificially create access points on future platforms. Part of ARCSPACE’s initial advantage could therefore be focused on the existing fleet and unprepared assets, while its cutting, assembly and welding capabilities would retain much greater potential for structural modification and on-orbit manufacturing.
Two million euros to cross the wall of theft
The announced funding should enable ARCSPACE to move from technological development to space qualification. The funds will be devoted to recruitment, qualification of flight hardware and the preparation of a first demonstration mission planned for 2027, with commercialization targeted from 2028.
On the scale of deep space technology, a round of 2 million euros remains modest: it does not alone finance the industrialization of a complete orbital service, but above all must make it possible to reach a milestone which changes the nature of the risk, namely moving from a technology tested on the ground to equipment demonstrated in space.
ARCSPACE indicates that it has already validated its system during high vacuum and mechanical vibration tests. The next step will be the demonstration in 2027. If successful, the company will be able to approach its commercialization with a technology space-proven.
From servicing to the orbital factory
Finally, repair is only the first stage of the roadmap. From 2028, ARCSPACE targets effectors intended for life extension, deorbiting and dual-use missions. The same technology must then be used to assemble large structures in orbit or on the Moon, then for manufacturing operations directly in space.
The change in scale is considerable: technology capable of assembling structures after launch would theoretically make it possible to design infrastructures that would no longer be constrained by the volume of a rocket’s fairing.
The ESA now explicitly includes refueling, repair, assembly, manufacturing and recycling in its vision of a more circular space economy. In June 2026, the agency and the European Commission strengthened their cooperation around In-Space Operations and Services and a European pilot mission planned for 2030. “The European Commission has identified operations and services in orbit as one of the foundations of the future European space economy,” underlines Justyna Redelkiewicz, Space Tech Venture Partner at DEPO Ventures, who sees in ARCSPACE one of the building blocks likely to power this future infrastructure.
The dimension is also strategic: a technology allowing a satellite to be extended, modified or put back into service is of interest to both commercial operators and defense players. In a space that has become critical infrastructure and a contested domain, maintainability also becomes a question of resilience.
Having learned how to recover its rockets, the space industry is now seeking to no longer throw away what they put into orbit. If technology progresses, it remains to build its economy.
