Three small defence announcements from November 9 cover three stages of the business: a factory being set up to build satellites at volume, a test contract for a new kind of aircraft, and a materials supplier getting larger repeat orders. None is large on its own. Together they show where smaller defence money is going right now.
Rheinmetall ICEYE: software for a satellite factory
Rheinmetall ICEYE Space Solutions (RISS) has chosen Manufacturo to manage production and quality control at its satellite plant in Neuss, Germany. RISS is a joint venture formed in November 2025, 60% owned by Rheinmetall and 40% by ICEYE, the Finnish maker of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites. About a month after it was formed, it won the Bundeswehr’s SPOCK 1 contract, worth about €1.7 billion gross, to provide radar reconnaissance from a German-owned constellation that RISS builds and operates.
The target is several dozen SAR satellites a year. Production, integration, testing and quality assurance all sit in Neuss, and Manufacturo’s software will tie supply, production and quality data together for every satellite, tracing each part from the moment it arrives from a supplier to final test. Manufacturo, with offices in Kraków, Brea, California and Tokyo, already works with ICEYE, SES and Mynaric.
This is the unglamorous side of sovereign space. Germany decided it wants its own radar constellation rather than buying images. Delivering several dozen satellites a year to a military customer means traceability on every part, and that has to be in place before the line runs at speed.
Electra: $4.7 million to test a hybrid-electric aircraft
Electra.aero, based in Manassas, Virginia, received a $4.7 million award from the Air Force Research Laboratory to test its EL9, a nine-passenger hybrid-electric aircraft built to take off and land in very short distances. The work covers verification of the power and propulsion system, ground testing of the preproduction aircraft, and acoustic flight tests of battery-only approaches and departures for special operations, where a quiet arrival matters. It also includes modelling how the aircraft could operate from more places with less ground equipment.
This builds on a 2023 STRATFI award worth up to $85 million for preproduction development, and on Electra’s part in AFRL’s Future Flag 25-3 exercise in 2025. Electra counts NASA, the Air Force, Army and Navy as customers, and Lockheed Martin Ventures, Honeywell and Safran as investors. It claims more than 2,200 letters of intent from over 60 commercial customers, though letters of intent are not orders.
First Graphene: a supplier moving up
Australia’s First Graphene (ASX: FGR) reported orders worth about A$45,000. About A$35,000 is a repeat order from a US customer that uses its graphene in electrically conductive inks for defence uses. The customer and the end product are confidential, but the company says the customer has bought for several years, the orders are getting bigger, and it expects demand to rise. The rest is two first orders for a new graphene oxide product, one for heat-spreading sheets in consumer electronics and one for building materials.
The sums are small. What matters is the pattern: a defence customer moving from samples to larger repeat buying of a new material, which is usually how qualification works before volume arrives.