A Lisbon Satellite Firm Puts Two Million Euros Into Laser Links for Drones and a Ground Station That Sends Quantum Keys

A laser beam is hard to jam and hard to intercept, because the only way to listen in is to stand in its path, and anything standing in its path is visible. That property is the reason a Lisbon company best known for putting Portuguese satellites in orbit is now spending more than two million euros on communications equipment for the armed forces.

LusoSpace, the firm behind the Constelação Lusíada, has two defence projects running. Both are about making it harder to interfere with the link between a command post and a ship or a drone.

Orion: radio for ships, laser for drones

The first, running since June, is called Orion, an integrated system of optical and VDES communications for territorial security missions. It carries 1.99 million euros of funding from the Recovery and Resilience Plan, of which 596,490 euros has been disbursed so far, according to the Mais Transparência portal.

It has two halves. One is radio-frequency communication with satellites for ships and for aerial vehicles, using VDES, the VHF Data Exchange System. "A type of VHF communication with low bandwidth but a great deal of resilience," the chief executive, Ivo Vieira, told ECO. "So even when there are storms, it keeps communicating well."

The other half is optical. "We are talking about a laser beam that allows communication between two entities," Vieira said. "In that project we are going to focus on a terminal that sits inside a drone." His case for it rests on two properties. Bandwidth is high. And "the only way for somebody to hear what we are going to say is to place themselves in the path of the beam, and then we can immediately observe that a vehicle is there and we interrupt the communication". It is also not susceptible to jamming.

Orion is at the design stage, with delivery scheduled for 31 May 2028. The Navy and the Air Force are expected to come in at a later phase to set requirements and run tests; the Army is also looking at the work.

A ground station that can send quantum keys

The second project goes further. LusoSpace is building an optical communications receiving station that can also transmit quantum keys. "It has an even higher level of security," Vieira said. That system is being developed with the Instituto de Telecomunicações in Aveiro, which he credits with deep experience in the field, and carries around one million euros from the European Space Agency through its ScyLight programme. The design phase is finishing and the project should be complete in about a year. Vieira would not name the entities the company has been talking to.

The defence work sits alongside the satellite business. In March, LusoSpace launched four more satellites with SpaceX under the New Space Agenda: Camões, Agustina, Pessoa and Saramago, part of a 15 million euro investment of which ten million came from the Recovery and Resilience Plan. Four more are built and waiting for launch slots, which would take the constellation to twelve. "By the summer of next year for certain," Vieira said of the launch window, without committing to dates. The stated ambition is 50 satellites in orbit within five years.

The commercial idea behind the constellation is a maritime tracking and messaging layer the company has described as a Waze for the oceans. The defence projects take the same underlying problem, keeping a reliable link to something far away and moving, and answer it for a customer that also needs the link to be impossible to listen to.