A Harwell-based company that designs, builds, launches and operates small satellites for customers, with the aim of making access to space cheaper.
Open Cosmos builds small satellites and runs them for other people. A customer with an idea, such as measuring the weather, watching crops or testing a new kind of radio signal, can come to the company and receive a working satellite without having to become a space expert. Its offer covers the whole job: designing and building the satellite, arranging a launch, getting access to ground stations that receive the data, and handling the regulatory paperwork. It also runs a platform called DataCosmos for satellite imagery. Missions listed on its Wikipedia page include MANTIS, a 12U CubeSat (a small satellite built from stacked 10 cm cubes) supported by ESA and the UK Space Agency, Phi-Sat-2, a machine learning mission for ESA, and ORPHEUS, built with Astroscale UK for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory.
The company was founded around 2015 by Rafel Jorda Siquier, a Spanish entrepreneur. In a 2018 interview he said he and colleagues had the idea about ten years earlier, and the team moved from Spain to the Harwell Space Cluster in Oxfordshire. The company's stated aim, as summarised on Wikipedia, is "reducing the cost of access to space". We did not find a longer mission or values statement, so we have not invented one. A first mission called QB50, which measured the lower atmosphere, was its first launch.
In the UK, Open Cosmos is headquartered at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus near Didcot, Oxfordshire, at an address on Thomson Avenue. The campus is home to more than 100 space organisations, which means engineers can work close to ESA and UK Space Agency teams, other start-ups and shared test facilities. Wikipedia says the company also has bases in Spain, Portugal and Greece, and that it employed more than 300 people as at June 2026. That is a very large jump from the small team that arrived in Oxfordshire, and shows how quickly a UK space start-up can grow.
The pages we could read say little about day-to-day culture, so we cannot describe it with any confidence. What can be seen is that the company works with a wide range of partners, from ESA and the UK Space Agency to Lacuna Space, Astroscale UK and Space Park Leicester, and that it works on a mix of weather, climate, communications and defence-related missions. Its business is built on speed and on a clear promise to customers that they can have a satellite in orbit in months rather than years.
A company like this employs many kinds of people. Spacecraft engineers design and test satellites, software engineers write flight and ground software, mission operators fly the satellites once they are in orbit, and data scientists turn what they collect into information customers can use. There are also project managers, sales and finance staff and regulatory specialists. Physics, maths, engineering and computing are the natural starting subjects, though the company's reach across several countries also suits people who enjoy languages and international work.
Website: www.open-cosmos.com
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