Lorenzo Maria Pacini
Viewed as a whole, the Italian space story resembles a quiet resurgence of the economic model founded on the country's creative and artisanal capabilities.
A Successful endeavor
It's hard to imagine it turning out any other way. The peninsula shapes those who live there, with the open sea ahead and, behind, mountains covered in forests, hidden trails, and pilgrimage routes that climb toward the unknown. From this geography emerged a people of merchants and travelers, driven toward the frontiers even before they were asked to reach them. Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Pietro Savorgnan di Brazza, Umberto Nobile: every great era of exploration has seen Italians at the forefront. Today, as the frontier has shifted upward - into low Earth orbit, then toward the Moon - that calling has not faded. It has simply moved elsewhere.
The paradox is that almost no one knows this. While the public associates space with Houston, Baikonur, or SpaceX's ventures, Italy has been cultivating expertise for over sixty years that few countries in the world possess in its entirety. The story begins much earlier than most people realize. In 1961, the government approved the first national three-year space plan, and from that plan emerged the San Marco Project, conceived by Luigi Broglio, an aeronautical engineer and officer in the Italian Air Force. On December 15, 1964, from Wallops Island, a Scout launch vehicle placed the San Marco 1 satellite into orbit.
That launch was not an isolated event. With San Marco 1, Italy became the third country in the world - after the Soviet Union and the United States - to design, build, launch into orbit, and control a satellite entirely with its own personnel, and the first in Europe to do so. On board was the so-called Broglio balance, an instrument capable of measuring the density of the upper atmosphere with unprecedented precision. Broglio took the ambition even further: he had a decommissioned ENI oil platform off the coast of Kenya, on the Equator, retrofitted and transformed into a launch base. In the 1970s, NASA used that Italian base to launch some of its own scientific satellites into orbit. This detail speaks volumes about the level achieved: the superpower entrusted its payloads to a facility managed by Italian technicians.
From that pioneering adventure emerged - almost unnoticed by the general public - an industrial tradition that today stands as one of a kind. Italy is among the very few countries in the world to have a fully integrated supply chain spanning the entire space value chain: from access to space to satellite manufacturing, from end-user services to the universities and research centers that fuel the system of expertise. This capability is by no means a given. Most space industry players specialize in a single segment and rely on foreign partners for the others. Controlling the entire chain means possessing strategic autonomy.
The numbers confirm the sector's strength. In 2024, the national space economy reached a turnover of approximately 4.5 billion euros, up 12.3 percent year-over-year, involving over 400 companies and employing more than 15,000 people. Italy ranks sixth worldwide in terms of the ratio of space investments to gross domestic product, and third in Europe in terms of its contribution to the European Space Agency's budget, which it funds by approximately 15 percent. The ratio of space spending to national wealth has nearly doubled in recent years.
Public funding has played a decisive role in supporting this expansion. Resources from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan have channeled substantial investments into the sector, which consists of approximately 80% highly specialized small and medium-sized enterprises, alongside major players such as Leonardo and Thales Alenia Space. Between 2023 and 2027, public funding allocated to the space ecosystem will total more than 7 billion euros. The flagship project of this strategy is IRIDE, the "constellation of constellations" for Earth observation, developed with PNRR funds and managed by the ESA in collaboration with the Italian Space Agency.
Dual use, single purpose
What has made space such a dynamic and contested sector is the dual nature of its technologies. The principle of dual use - whereby the same technology is used for both civilian and military purposes - permeates nearly every segment of the sector. Earth observation is the clearest example of this. A satellite infrastructure for Earth Observation is used to map and monitor borders, support intelligence activities, and build fast communication networks that are difficult to intercept. The same capabilities, applied to civilian uses, power satellite navigation, fire and emergency monitoring, and the observation of previously invisible terrestrial phenomena.
One case clearly illustrates just how much that view from above can reveal. Thanks to satellite observation, it has been possible to map in real time the link between Saharan dust carried by the wind and the fertilization of Amazon rainforest soils: the sand transported across the Atlantic deposits phosphorus that regenerates the Amazonian soil. This connection between ecosystems thousands of kilometers apart - invisible from the ground - has been made clear only by the orbital perspective. In other words, building satellites does not merely provide additional military surveillance; it broadens our understanding of natural systems - a field that is, in turn, crucial for deep-space exploration.
The most everyday benefit, however, comes from materials science. Much of the technology behind thermal shielding and reflective materials - right down to the ordinary sun visors we all place on our car dashboards - stems from space research. It's no surprise that about 60% of companies in the sector integrate space activities with other industries. This figure reflects the interconnection between space and the Earth's economy: the orbital frontier is not a separate realm, but a laboratory that feeds innovations into other markets.
Then there is the most fascinating prospect of all: laboratories and simulators in orbit. Space offers not only a privileged observatory but also physical conditions that cannot be replicated on Earth. In the absence of gravity, matter behaves differently; processes such as solidification, crystallization, and combustion follow rules that remain masked on Earth by terrestrial forces. Studying these phenomena in microgravity paves the way for discoveries that can broaden our understanding of physics and energy - and lead to innovations that are difficult to even imagine today. It is one of the areas where research - in Italy and beyond - still has a great deal of room to advance.
The regulatory leap
For decades, the Italian space industry operated within a legal vacuum. Authorizations, liabilities, insurance coverage, and oversight: everything was governed by fragmented regulations, often derived by analogy from other sectors. On June 11, 2025, the Senate closed that gap by definitively approving the Space Economy Act, later published as Law No. 89 of 2025. With this act, Italy became the first European country - and one of the first in the world - to adopt a comprehensive framework law dedicated to the space economy.
The legislation explicitly recognizes space as a crossroads of geopolitical, economic, scientific, and military interests. It introduces a requirement for prior authorization for space activities - from launches to the management of satellite constellations, from debris disposal to stratospheric platforms - and grants the Italian Space Agency oversight and enforcement powers. It also establishes a Space Economy Fund, with an initial allocation intended to complement resources from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) and ESA programs. On the industrial front, it provides for exemptions from the public procurement code designed to facilitate the entry of innovative startups and SMEs - the entities that form the backbone of the supply chain.
"Italy is charting Europe's course into space," summarized Minister Adolfo Urso, the official responsible for space policy, asserting Italy's regulatory leadership. ASI President Teodoro Valente spoke of an "epochal step." Setting aside institutional rhetoric, the law addresses a concrete need: transforming a wealth of dispersed expertise into a governance capacity, where the state, businesses, and research institutions operate within a shared framework of rules and priorities.
Not everything has remained outside the political fray. The article establishing the "national transmission capacity reserve" - a government communications network that can be activated in the event of a disaster or conflict, and which can also be managed by private operators from EU or NATO countries - has fueled a heated debate over the possible involvement of non-European companies, with explicit references to SpaceX. The issue touches on a fundamental question: how long can declared technological sovereignty hold up if critical infrastructure depends on external suppliers?
The resurgence of the italian model
Viewed as a whole, the Italian space story resembles a quiet resurgence of the economic model founded on the country's creative and artisanal capabilities. Not a monolithic behemoth imposed from above, but an ecosystem of small and medium-sized enterprises with extremely high technological content, held together by a few major players and a network of universities and research centers. The same logic that made Italian manufacturing competitive has now been transferred to orbit.
There is also a reversed industrial geography. Whereas traditional manufacturing seeks proximity, territorial integration, and compact clusters, the space sector distributes its activities throughout the entire country, with specialized hubs communicating remotely within a dispersed yet coherent supply chain. It is a model that partly breaks the rules of classic physical positioning - and finds its resilience precisely in this dispersion.
Global projections provide the backdrop for this venture. By 2024, the space economy had surpassed $600 billion worldwide, and estimates project it will reach $1,790 billion by 2035, driven primarily by private operators. According to the ESA, every euro invested in space programs can generate up to four euros in economic value and attract nearly three euros in additional private capital. In an industrial race where the United States and China are in the lead - with Europe hampered by the fragmentation of its investments - Italy's position is more solid than the sector's low profile would suggest.
There remains a gap between the reality of the sector and how it is perceived. A country that was the third in the world to reach orbit, that lends its launch site to NASA, and that enacted the first European framework law on space, continues to portray itself as marginal in a field it actually helped to establish.
Regaining awareness of this excellence is not an exercise in national pride: it is the prerequisite for ensuring that the industrial and strategic decisions of the coming years are made with the confidence of those who already know they are, in that field, among the few who matter.