Credit: Loft Orbital / Thales Alenia Space / TEKEVER France
The French space agency CNES awarded a contract to a consortium led by Loft Orbital to develop a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery demonstrator. According to the company, the aim of the project is to foster the development of a “national radar imaging value chain.”
Announced by Loft Orbital and consortium partner Thales Alenia Space on 22 January, the DESIR (Démonstrateur des Éléments Souverains en Imagerie Radar or Demonstrator of Sovereign Radar Imaging Elements) initiative is led by CNES on behalf of the country’s defence procurement and technology agency, DGA.
Loft Orbital will be the project’s prime contractor and will be responsible for the satellite and the ground control segment. Thales Alenia Space in France will be responsible for developing the satellite’s SAR payload and the user ground segment, working closely with a third consortium partner, TEKEVER France, which will develop the active antenna integrated into the imager.
The primary advantage of a SAR Earth observation system is its ability to collect high-resolution data day or night, regardless of weather conditions or cloud cover. This makes it an important tool for persistent Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) across a wide range of civil and military applications.
While the 22 January announcements from both Thales Alenia Space and Loft Orbital suggest that the contract award is a recent development, the decision to do so appears to predate these announcements by several months. The DGA’s International Defence Companies Notebook 2026, which was published in December 2025, reveals that the DESIR project was entrusted to Loft Orbital in June 2025. The notebook also reveals that the CNES-led project has a total budget of €50 million.
The French government’s 2026 budget documentation for Programme 191 (Dual-Use Research) frames DESIR as a SAR Earth observation demonstrator intended to validate the feasibility and overall architecture of a future space-based system, mature sovereign technology building blocks, and strengthen national capabilities in radar image processing. The previous edition of this document states that industrial work on the DESIR project was expected to begin in 2025, which is supported by the International Defence Companies Notebook.
According to announcements made on 22 January, the demonstrator is expected to enter service in early 2029. Thales Alenia Space has indicated that this would be followed by “two years of operations”, while Loft Orbital’s release is less definitive, stating that the operational phase will last “at least two years.”
Keep European Spaceflight Independent
Your donation will help European Spaceflight to continue digging into the stories others miss. Every euro keeps our reporting alive.