On day three of World Space Business Week in Paris, Laura Todd steps away from MCing the Space Innovation Summit to speak with Franck Mouriaux, acting CEO of FADA, an EDGE company, about one of the fastest build-outs in the sector.
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FADA was created in 2024, starting from a blank page with a mandate from leadership to create sovereign capability in the UAE – shifting the country away from buying toward developing and building. Two years on, the company is already midway through its journey, developing a SAR satellite due to fly in 2028. Mouriaux also shares newer news: FADA now has its first satellite on orbit, acquired and operated by the company, making it, in his words, a real space company with a real satellite.
That milestone brings practical benefits beyond the achievement itself. Operating a satellite allows the team to develop and prove the ground infrastructure that will support the future satellites and constellations to come. Alongside it, FADA is procuring antennas and has developed a complete suite for operating multi-constellation, multi-sensor systems and conducting mission planning. The team itself has grown from nothing to around 40 people and continues to expand.
Asked how so much has been achieved in such a short period, Mouriaux points to the advantage of operating as a startup within a strong industrial group, able to draw on EDGE’s existing engineering expertise, talent and production capacity. Equally important, as Todd observes, is FADA’s big-picture strategy: thinking through the entire end-to-end value chain and implementing it iteratively – an approach matured in the early stages before the company was even launched, leveraging EDGE’s experience developing complex systems and platforms.
The conversation broadens into a reflection on the industry as a whole. Where traditionally established Western players have sometimes been stuck in familiar patterns, more dynamic behaviour and innovation are emerging globally. Technology, Mouriaux notes, is becoming increasingly accessible, and the technical building blocks, knowledge and know-how are all available. The real differentiator is the capability to articulate a plan and then execute it. Looking to the next twelve months, his ambition is simply to keep the pace – readying FADA’s first indigenously built satellite for launch and beginning the other programmes already on paper.
