Spain’s aerospace prowess

Making planes since the early days of manned flight, Spain’s expertise in the aviation and aerospace sectors has grown over the years, making it one of today’s world leaders in these fields, with the country becoming a major supplier of military aircraft, space systems, and equipment.

As a case in point, when the Spanish Ministry of Defence (MoD) sought replacements for the nation’s P-3 Orion maritime patrol and CN-235 VIGMA maritime surveillance aircraft (MPA and MSA, respectively), some years ago, despite considering other options, the ministry did not have to look far for its eventual choice. Indigenously-designed and manufactured configurations of Airbus’ C295 were just what was needed, with 16 ordered and the first plans now under construction at the company’s Seville plant. While a sizeable and impressive EUR 1.695 billion contract, announced in December 2023, represents the latest milestone from within the heart of Spain’s significant aerospace sector – more precisely, in this instance, from within the country’s Andalusian Aerospace Cluster – and highlights the comprehensive expertise and leading position of Spain on the world aerospace stage.

Regions and brief overview

According to a report by the US International Trade Administration (ITA), Spain’s aerospace industry, which currently has 51,000 employees, was ranked 5th in Europe and 8th globally in 2022, in terms of turnover. The sector’s activities are largely regionally concentrated, mainly around Madrid, the Castilla La Mancha and Castile-León regions, with these three together accounting for some 88% of the sector’s activities, followed by Andalusia, the Basque Country, and, to a lesser extent, Catalonia.

The companies spread across these regions, between them have capabilities to meet many civil and military-sector requirements, whether at home, or for export; it is interesting to note, that in 2022, according to the Spanish Government’s ‘Invest in Spain’ business entity, 49% of aeronautics and 75% of space-sector sales were from exports. Those capabilities and expertise cover almost everything from composite materials for aircraft structures, such as wings, stabilisers and flight-control surfaces, down to the specialist adhesives and fastening systems that hold them together, not to mention engines, engine parts and assembly work, all the way to complete military transport aircraft and helicopter manufacture, as well as refuelling airframe conversion. Major players, including Airbus, Boeing, CAE, the European Space Agency (ESA), ITP Aero, Lockheed Martin, Safran, SpaceX, Thales, and many more leading names all have a major presence and facilities in the country.

The sector receives state backing, since it is what the government refers to as a ‘strategic industry’, which helps maintain the complete design-to-manufacture capability Spain has, delivered by the sector’s established original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and major companies, such as the aforementioned Airbus and ITP Aero, respectively. Yet they couldn’t do it without the involvement of the numerous SMEs and start-up partners and suppliers spread across Spain’s key aerospace regions.

Engine prowess

Of the more than 720 production centres across the country, engine and gas turbine maker, ITP Aero, is but one example, headquartered in the Basque Country, with facilities across five Spanish regions, including Madrid. It was originally formed as a joint venture between Rolls Royce and Spanish engineering group, SENER, to address requirements for the Eurofighter Typhoon programme, and now claims to be the “ninth-largest aircraft engine and component company in the world”. The Eurofighter programme, involving Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK, is just one of several Europe-wide projects with Spanish aerospace industry involvement. As a member of the Eurojet Turbo consortium, which developed the Typhoon and its EJ200 engine, ITP Aero is instrumental in several aspects of the engine, including design, manufacture, assembly and testing; more than 1,200 of the engines have already been supplied to members of the fighter programme.

In mid-2022, Eurojet announced that 48 new EJ200 engines would be delivered to the Spanish Air Force under Project Halcón, aimed at increasing the Air Force’s then 70-strong Typhoon fleet stationed on the Canary Islands; ITP, along with its consortium partners, is involved in production of the engine modules, although the Spanish company alone is responsible for final assembly of the engines at its Ajalvir facility – as is the case for all EJ200s destined for the nation’s air force. Deliveries began at the start of 2024. The company also provides the maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) support for the engines in service on Spanish Air Force Eurofighters, as well as on some other Typhoons in European and Middle Eastern service. With the aircraft set to eventually replace all the F/A-18 Super Hornets in Spain’s inventory in 2030, ITP’s work on EJ200 has been a notable step forward from the component parts’ manufacturing it has conducted over the years for the Hornets’ GE F414 engines.

The dominance of Airbus

When it comes to OEMs, Airbus Defence and Space, as Spain’s largest player in the sector, has in-country military aircraft production and final assembly lines (FALs) for both fixed and rotary-wing aircraft such as the Eurofighter, the C295 variants mentioned earlier, the A400M Atlas military transport aircraft, and the latest NH90 helicopters.

The company actually leads many of the nation’s aerospace programmes, whether national or with international collaboration, and is also the main supplier of fighter, transport and rotary-winged aircraft to the Spanish Air Force. In the case of NH90, Airbus expects the intended anti-submarine NH90 HSPN variant for the Spanish Navy to be made in-country in line with the MoD’s Defence Industrial Strategy 2023, which set out its vision to develop the nation’s defence industry in ways to make Spain and its armed forces strategically independent in their capabilities, as well as being leading contributors to overall European defence needs. Spanish aerospace and defence company, Indra, state-owned naval shipbuilder, Navantia and defence electronics specialist, Tecnobit, will all play a role in this major programme under the overall coordination of Airbus, as prime contractor, making it very much a Spanish, family affair. At this time, the company’s Albacete plant is already responsible for NH90 front and centre fuselage production for all other variants of the helicopter.

The company’s national HQ is located to the south of Madrid, at Getafe, which is also its third-largest site; among many other activities there, it houses the FAL for Spanish Eurofighters and the conversion centre turning A330 airframes into multirole, air-to-air refuelling tankers. Its Seville, San Pablo site handles military transport projects, including final assembly for the aforementioned A400M and C295 aircraft.

The company is also heading up Spanish participation in the EU’s European Medium Altitude Long Endurance Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (MALE RPAS), or Eurodrone project, which aims to develop what the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) entity describes as an ‘operationally relevant, affordable and sovereign European military capability for the next-generation of MALE RPAS’ by 2030. Getafe, where the company already conducts extensive UAV systems design and development, will act as Eurodrone’s lead engineering office.

A lively ecosystem

Airbus, however, is not the only major player taking a lead role in Spain’s aerospace activities, with many major domestic names, such as Indra, crucial to Spain’s strategic objectives. Indra, for its part, among its many major projects, is, along with Airbus and Dassault Aviation, one of the prime collaborators on the European Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project and, in January 2024, announced its ‘FCAS Challenge’ to involve Spanish SMEs and start-ups in the fighter programme. As well as its participating role in the programme proper, Indra is also Spain’s industrial coordinator in the project and has launched this challenge initiative, giving the whole lower-tier, Spanish aerospace ecosystem the opportunity to take part in this major European venture. Spain though Indra, France through Dassault, and Germany through Airbus, are participating in the project in equal parts to develop a new-generation fighter, one that will team with remote operators and be highly connected with other platforms across all domains of any battlespace via the combat cloud.

By bringing together greater Spanish participation at all levels, Indra’s challenge will only help further bolster Spain’s strategic self-reliance and its domestic industrial aerospace capabilities beyond FCAS. In the meantime, a number of SMEs and start-ups have already received accolades for their FCAS Challenge proposals, including: Beamagine from Catalonia and EM3works from Galicia in the mission-sensor category; Multiverse Computing from the Basque Country and Pixels-Hub from Asturias for signal intelligence work; Madrid’s Red Skios in the field of smart communications; and several players from Galicia, Catalonia and Andalusia, partnered to deliver combat cloud expertise.

Spain in space

Let’s now take a look at Spain in space, where many Spanish companies offer services and manufactured solutions for a wide range of defence-related and commercial activities, from complete satellites to ground Earth stations and even launch systems. As the main aerospace region and home to many leading OEMs, Madrid also plays host to various space-related organisations including the country’s aeronautics, space and hydrodynamics R&D centre – the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA) – a public research organisation with MoD support and which previously acted as Spain’s de facto space agency. In October 2023, amongst its many activities, INTA launched its first cluster of three ANSER (Advanced Nanosatellites System for Earth Observation Research) CubeSats into low earth orbit, as part of its small satellites programme and, in so doing, highlighted Spain’s considerable progress in space-related fields; at the other end of the sector are many SMEs and start-ups, of which Catalonia-based, Kreios Space, which focuses on electric propulsion solutions for satellites, is just one example.

Though INTA previously acted as the nation’s space agency, that baton was passed to the new Spanish Space Agency, which became operational in April 2023. In 16 March 2023, another new agency, Space Command (MESPA), was created, becoming established on 16 October 2023. MESPA comprises air and space force military personnel, as well as civilian technical advisors from Defence Systems Engineering (ISDEFE), with its purpose to monitor and identify any threats to Spanish territories from space; its initial operational capability is slated for the end of 2024.

Meanwhile, in Catalonia, the Catalan Space Agency was established in 2021, though not without a degree of scepticism from the wider Spanish space community as to whether it was simply another political move to further drive a wedge between the region and the rest of the country. That said, the agency does seem to be making progress, with its third nanosatellite, Minairó, entering orbit in April 2023 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as part of a 5G communications connectivity experiment. It is also worth noting, that Valencia has also had its own agency, the Val Space Consortium, active in space R&D since 2010, accompanied by a wealth of other space centres across the country, including Boeing’s European Centre for Research and Technology and NASA’s Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex.

In addition to its own organisations, Spain’s space expertise, (developed over seven decades and including early work with NASA in the 1960s on space tracking), is a crucial component to many ESA programmes in which Spain participates as an ESA member; it currently contributes EUR 300 million, annually, to the agency and today is a key provider of high-tech sub-systems for ESA-related space and ground-segment platforms and equipment.

Spain’s wider space community also conducts R&D in a number of other areas, including astrobiology, imaging and remote sensing, as well as materials science and propulsion. Its satellite capabilities include complete space vehicles, nano or CubeSats, as per the INTA example above, as well as larger platforms made by Airbus. Other programmes with Spanish space-sector involvement, include the EU’s Galileo programme, where the MoD has been supervising the hosting and maintenance of Galileo’s ground control segment (GCS) at a secure INTA site at Torrejón de Ardoz for several years.

Copernicus is another EU project, this time for land surface temperature monitoring, where the satellite has been developed by Airbus Space Systems at its Getafe site in Madrid. ESA’s European global navigation satellite system (GNSS) programmes also have Spanish involvement. Spain also has ongoing participation with ESA’s BepiColombo Mercury planetary orbiter, Europe’s first mission to the planet, and also conducted a test launch of PLD Space’s Miura-1, recoverable, suborbital launch vehicle in 2023, the first Spanish-built launch vehicle of its kind.

Clearly, from just the above examples, Spain is certainly playing its part filling the void of space. However, in taking its responsibilities seriously, it signed up to the NASA-inspired, non-binding Artemis Accords in 2023, which set out the norms and guidance for activities in space, critical at a time when the domain is becoming increasingly cluttered, as well as militarised.

In relation to Copernicus, probably the most significant player in Spain’s space industry is Airbus Space Systems; it is the only prime contractor for such large satellite production in the country, but also applies its material science expertise in carbon fibre composites to construct major parts of both Ariane 6 and Vega-C rockets; it also makes payload sub-systems for several ESA satellite projects. Additionally, and a high-profile example, both currently operational NASA Mars rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance, incorporate communications and meteorological technologies from Airbus.

Final word

While this taster hopefully illustrates that Spain’s aerospace ecosystem is world leading in its capabilities. Its many players, both big and small, and their products and expertise, all help to make up this significantly capable Spanish industry and enable it to contribute, to major defence and commercial aerospace projects and programmes both at home and globally. Where it has had weaknesses, such as a past dearth in missile capabilities, this particular area looks set to grow in strength following the 2021 formation of Spanish Missile Systems (SMS), a collaborative effort between Sener Aeroespacial, GMV and Escribano M&E. The company’s 2023 contract with the EU for the European Hypersonic Defence Interceptor (EU HYDEF), as consortium lead under the management of the Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation (OCCAR) in the EUR 100 million programme, is testament to international confidence in Spanish capabilities in this area. EU HYDEF is certainly a programme to watch in an increasingly unstable world.

Tim Guest