British Satellite Firm Open Cosmos Sets Up in Porto and Recruits 50 for Its Portugal Push

Portugal's small but ambitious space sector has a new anchor in the north. Open Cosmos, a British satellite manufacturer that has been building up a presence in the country since 2022, has opened an office in Porto and is recruiting fifty people to staff its expanding Portuguese operation — a hiring push that spans both the new Porto base and its existing hub in Coimbra.

The Porto office has opened at the Hipercentro da Areosa business park, on the eastern edge of the city, and the roles on offer read like a cross-section of the modern satellite industry. The company is looking for technical systems specialists, engineers in AIT — assembly, integration and testing, the painstaking work of putting a spacecraft together and proving it will survive launch and orbit — as well as satellite designers, mission-concept experts and business-development staff to chase new contracts. It is, in other words, hiring across the whole life cycle of a satellite, from the first sketch of a mission to the moment hardware is signed off for flight.

Open Cosmos is not starting from scratch in Portugal. About a year ago it acquired the Portuguese company Connected, a deal it framed less as an exit for the founders than as a springboard for growth, and it is now preparing to open a clean room in Coimbra for the assembly of satellites — the sealed, dust-controlled environment in which spacecraft are built. That combination of a design-and-business office in Porto and a production facility in Coimbra gives the company an industrial footprint in Portugal that goes well beyond a sales presence.

The plans behind the recruitment are substantial. Open Cosmos has said it intends to launch three Portuguese satellites and to raise its investment in the country to €50 million over three years — figures that would make it one of the more significant private players in Portugal's push to build what officials like to call "space sovereignty", the capacity to design, build and operate satellites domestically rather than buying the service from abroad. Earth-observation data, of the kind these small satellites gather, underpins everything from wildfire monitoring and coastal management to agriculture and defence.

The company's momentum extends beyond Portugal's borders. In late July it was named to lead a European Earth-observation mission for the European Space Agency, a mark of the credibility it has built in a competitive field dominated by larger, older firms. For a business that assembles spacecraft on Portuguese soil, that kind of continental mandate helps justify the scale of the local hiring — and signals that the work landing in Porto and Coimbra is tied to real missions, not speculative expansion.

For Portugal, the arrival of fifty specialised jobs in Porto is a meaningful vote of confidence in a region better known for textiles, wine and software than for spacecraft. It slots into a wider national ambition, nurtured over the past decade through the country's space agency and the Azores launch-site project, to carve out a niche in the European space economy. Whether Portugal can retain the engineers it trains — rather than exporting them to better-funded rivals abroad — will be one measure of whether investments like this one take root. For now, the message from Open Cosmos is that it is building here to stay.