WASHINGTON — Airbus executives say the turnaround in the company’s space business came just in time to tap growing demand, particularly from Europe, for space capabilities as it pursues a joint venture with Thales and Leonardo.
Mike Schoellhorn, chief executive of Airbus Defence and Space, said at a July 21 business update that efforts to improve the performance of its space systems business unit were yielding benefits across the division as demand for its capabilities grows.
“There couldn’t have been a better time to fix the space business and to be ready for the significant orders and demand that we are currently seeing,” he said.
That demand is coming from both civil and defense customers. He cited record funding for the European Space Agency at last November’s ministerial conference, the IRIS² secure connectivity constellation being led by the European Commission and interest in military satellite systems.
“Europe is really doubling down with constellations. You hear IRIS². You hear military constellations. You hear Earth observation. And even in the very institutional exploration business, there’s significant traction,” he said.
Airbus is able to capture that demand, he argued, because of reforms it implemented after taking nearly 2 billion euros ($2.3 billion) in charges in 2023 and 2024 on space programs. The company blamed the charges on poor cost and schedule performance on programs that carried technology risks, such as its OneSat software-defined GEO communications satellite.
Schoellhorn said the “major transformation” of the space division to address those issues has been successful. “That has created the entrepreneurial ownership that we wanted to see.”
“We have really taken the lessons learned from the space mishaps before in terms of the discipline on the order intake, the quality of the order intake, the risk management, the project management, the ability to deliver and to be ready to deliver when the project starts,” he said. “These have been very valuable and have been applied across the board into the whole division.”
He did not quantify the impact of those changes on the business this year. Airbus officials at the briefing cited a blackout period ahead of the release of its financial results for the first half of 2026, scheduled for July 29.
Schoellhorn did state that growing demand for Earth observation data has the company mulling an expansion of that business. “Whenever there’s a crisis, people want pictures of that crisis, and we scramble to deliver those pictures,” he said. “We’re quite good at it, but we’re thinking about increasing the capacity as well.”
The improvement of the space business at Airbus comes as the company presses ahead with a joint venture that would combine that business with similar divisions at Leonardo and Thales Alenia Space. The three companies formally announced plans for the joint venture, code-named Bromo, in October after more than a year of negotiations.
Schoellhorn said little about the status of efforts to win regulatory approvals for Bromo, something the companies said last year would likely not be completed until 2027. The joint venture faces some opposition, ranging from labor unions worried about layoffs that would result from the combined entity to OHB, the German space company that has raised concerns about its effects on competition.
He said Bromo will be one of three such joint ventures Airbus Defence and Space is involved with, alongside missile producer MBDA and ArianeGroup. The three are projected to provide about 15 billion euros annually in revenue for the company. The rest of Airbus Defence and Space, he said, would be “air power centric.”
“So we have a clear plan and a clear vision of where we want to continue” in the transformation of the business, he said, “moving even farther away from the old hodgepodge of putting everything in one bowl and then maybe not having the grip on the business as we want it.”
However, he appeared to be open to scenarios where the Bromo joint venture does not go through. He noted that Airbus Defence and Space had earnings before interest and taxes, or EBIT, of 800 million euros in 2025 and has a goal of achieving EBIT of 1.3 billion euros in 2029.
“Some of you might ask, and I anticipate the question, is that with or without Bromo?” he said. “My answer will be it is robust against both scenarios.”