€13.9 Million, Delivered as Data: Creotech Takes ESA's SAWA Mission

Creotech Instruments has signed a contract with the European Space Agency for the project "Space Weather Nanosatellite Enhancement – Phase B/C/D/E": the build, orbital placement and operation of a nanosatellite named SAWA, which the company calls SAWA – 2nd Space Weather Nanosat. Creotech disclosed the contract in a current report to the Warsaw Stock Exchange on 1 September, filed as inside information under the Market Abuse Regulation, and the figures below are the filing's.

The total project value is €13.9 million. Execution runs from October 2026 to October 2030. The launch of the operational satellite is planned for the first half of 2029 in the filing's wording, which Creotech's own release compresses to early 2029, with the satellite and the service handed over in September 2029. The contract includes one year of data collection and transmission services, and an option to extend data transmission to ESA for two further years for an additional fee of about €1.9 million.

What SAWA measures

SAWA sits in ESA's Distributed Space Weather Sensor System, D3S, alongside Aurora-D, Swing and Sword, a set of small missions and hosted payloads that ESA describes as monitoring the near-Earth environment for space-weather conditions that may affect vulnerable infrastructure. ESA says SAWA will target complementary measurements in the Earth's thermosphere and of the Earth's magnetic field, and that its data will feed into models and services providing space-weather alerts and forecasting tools. Creotech's filing puts the applications plainly: near-real-time data on the magnetosphere and thermosphere, used by aviation and by power systems.

Creotech's release states that the project is financed through Poland's contribution to the Space Weather and Space Safety Programme, one of the optional ESA programmes member states subscribe to individually.

The satellite is built on HyperSat, Creotech's proprietary platform. The company says SAWA will be the thirteenth satellite based on the HyperSat system to be launched, after the PIAST constellation, MikroGlob, CAMILA and the EagleEye test satellite. Creotech names its partners for this phase as the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Wrocław University of Science and Technology, responsible for the scientific instruments, and N7 Space, which provides the software. At study phase in November 2024, under a €175,000 Phase 0-A contract, three instruments were to come from the Space Research Centre and one from Wrocław University of Science and Technology; that feasibility study, covering phases 0 and A, was completed in 2025. The current report itself names no subcontractors.

The model

Creotech is prime contractor. In the words of Dr Grzegorz Brona, President of the Management Board, this is the first time a Polish entity will be responsible for the end-to-end delivery of a satellite mission to ESA under the mission-as-a-service model; the company's release makes the same claim structurally, describing the first mission in Polish history delivered to ESA under that model, with a Polish entity acting as prime contractor and integrator for the entire mission.

The structure of the contract supports the description. ESA is contracting the delivery of data, one year of it with an option for two more, rather than the delivery of a satellite, and the same company builds it, places it in orbit and operates it.

For a €13.9 million programme that is a compact arrangement, and the option is the part worth reading twice. About €1.9 million buys two additional years of data transmission after the project ends in October 2030, which is where the mission's value to ESA's forecasting services would accumulate if the satellite performs. Creotech says SAWA will conduct observations for up to three years, which is what the contracted year and the optional two add to.

The Space Insights read

The reading that follows is ours, not a Creotech or ESA characterisation of the contract.

Two things a reader can plan around. The first is a route: a small ESA space-weather mission contracted end to end to a national prime, delivered as data, at a value below €15 million, and paid for out of the member state's own subscription to the optional programme that buys it. That is a national contribution converted into a domestic prime contract and a domestic supply chain, which is a return a smaller ESA member state can point to on an optional-programme subscription. The second is a date: the filing has the satellite and the service handed over in September 2029, which is when SAWA data would begin to matter to the aviation and power-system users it names.

This is the third week in a row with a Polish dateline in Space Insights, after the IRIS² contribution and the Starlink roaming reversal in W35 and the Gdańsk interference measurements in W36. Those are separate subjects, named here as cross-references and not as one story: space weather is a natural-environment measurement, not interference or connectivity.

What to watch

The Phase B/C/D/E milestones as Creotech reports them to the exchange, since a listed company's current reports are a reliable calendar for this mission. The planned 2029 launch, and which vehicle it rides, which neither the filing nor the release says. And whether ESA contracts the other D3S nanosatellites on the same model.