From DefTech Day 2026 at the airfield in Erding – where live reconnaissance and combat scenarios played out alongside the exhibition – Torsten Kriening visits the LiveEO booth to speak with co-founder Daniel Seidel, fresh from an active role in the day’s scenario before an audience of some 1,500 people.
The headline development came the previous day: an alliance between LiveEO, Airbus Defence and Space, IABG and IBM Germany. Seidel frames the rationale clearly. Amid a wave of announcements about new satellite constellations, the complementary need is for sovereign data infrastructure and AI solutions capable of turning all that imagery into usable insight. The four partners bring highly complementary expertise, with IBM Germany significant both legally and in governance terms as a German entity – and Seidel describes genuine enthusiasm about building sovereign infrastructure for Germany together.
The capability on display at the booth illustrates the point. An interactive 3D terrain model, built on Airbus satellite imagery processed through LiveEO’s AI, allows users to explore the landscape, identify slopes, and plan drone missions with recent data. Crucially, it contains no drone data at all: everything comes from space, produced at that resolution and precision within minutes of the satellite imagery being received – and already delivered for thousands of locations. This, Seidel emphasises, is not a concept on a slide but something available to buy today.
Asked why the company is nonetheless building its own Twinspector constellation, Seidel points to capacity, cost and control. The premium optical systems LiveEO currently relies on are highly performant and will remain part of the picture, but for bread-and-butter 3D generation across large areas, the company needs greater capacity at reduced cost – going hand in hand with its existing partners rather than replacing them.
The sovereignty argument is where the conversation sharpens. Germany, Seidel notes, currently has no commercial operator for high-resolution electro-optical imagery. The optical systems from Airbus are French and therefore European; the other commonly used providers are American, albeit one with a long-standing German footprint. LiveEO aims to be the first genuinely German-founded, German-operated end-to-end mission producing such datasets – a proposition now being discussed with the relevant stakeholders.
With Twinspector reportedly on schedule, Seidel closes on the issue he hears most often from the space community at events like this one: access to space. A constellation does not stop at two launches, and launch availability remains, in his view, Europe’s most pressing problem.
