Sener Aeroespacial

Sener Aeroespacial is the aerospace and defence arm of Sener, the Basque engineering group founded in 1956 and still run from Getxo, outside Bilbao. Space work began in 1967. The unit now runs to roughly 800 engineers working across Europe and the Americas, and its output divides into three markets: space, defence and aeronautics.

Space is the oldest and deepest of the three. Sener designs and qualifies electromechanical equipment, deployment and pointing mechanisms, antennas and radio frequency assemblies, guidance, navigation and control software, and orbital robotics, and it counts more than 10,000 onboard items flown on over 1,400 satellites. The catalogue is shaped by missions rather than by products. MAGBOOM carries the magnetometer clear of the spacecraft body on the European Space Agency's JUICE probe to Jupiter, the Scan Assembly points the imager on Meteosat Third Generation, and the Hard Capture System is the docking half of the International Berthing and Docking Mechanism. SIROM is a standard interface for robotic manipulation in orbit, and the DTA10 actuator series drives electric propulsion modules and deployable radiators on Airbus satellite platforms. Mechanical ground support equipment for Euclid and Biomass came out of the same workshops. Sener also holds hardware positions on Proba-3, Solar Orbiter, BepiColombo, Space Rider, the Rosalind Franklin rover, SpainSat NG and the SEOSAT/Ingenio Earth observation satellite, along with optics and astronomy equipment for ground telescopes.

Defence points the same disciplines at weapons. Sener builds control sections and electromechanical actuators for guided munitions, and its hardware sits inside Meteor, IRIS-T, Taurus KEPD 350, RBS 70 NG, PAC-3 MSE and the Naval Strike Missile. Around that sit communications intelligence and electronic warfare payloads, secure data links, satellite communications and cyber-secure command systems, and the certifiable multidomain pod developed to NATO requirements. There is a family of target and threat-representative air vehicles too, running from the jet-powered SCRAB I, II and III through the light ALBA and the HUMMING-PROP multirotor to the MOAI target tug, and the RRS-1 unmanned ground vehicle on the land side. The company reckons more than a thousand of its systems are deployed on air, land and naval platforms. It works on the Future Combat Air System and supplies the line-of-sight data link for Eurodrone.

Aeronautics is the third leg and the quietest. It covers aircraft systems engineering, mechanical and electrical design, ground support equipment and modernisation of aircraft already in service, sold mainly as engineering work rather than as catalogue hardware. Sener opened a branch in Seville aimed at aerospace and defence customers in Andalusia, close to the Airbus military assembly line there. The aerospace unit also draws on a parent group of more than 4,500 people working across eighteen countries in energy, mobility and digital infrastructure, which gives it industrial and test resources beyond what a business of 800 engineers would normally reach.