Starion Group

Starion Group, headquartered in Wavre, Belgium (adjacent to the European Space Agency's ESTEC technical center in Noordwijk and Thales Alenia Space's Belgian operations) and founded in 1992, is a major European space engineering services company with 800+ employees providing technical expertise, software development, and systems engineering support across ESA missions, European national space agencies, and commercial satellite programs.

Starion's core business is supplying specialized space engineers to ESA and European prime contractors on a staff augmentation and managed services basis — a model common in the European space industry where ESA's political structure requires broad member state industrial participation, making it more efficient for ESA centers to draw on a constellation of technical services firms rather than maintaining large permanent in-house engineering staffs. Starion engineers work embedded within ESA teams at ESTEC, ESOC, ESRIN, and ESAC, contributing to programs across satellite development, ground system operations, and mission science.

Starion's software products include the Astral tool suite — a suite of ground segment software applications for satellite mission operations including monitoring and control, data processing, and operations automation — and the CDP4-COMET platform. CDP4-COMET (a Concurrent Design Platform, open-source based on ESA's CDF methodology) is a collaborative systems engineering environment that enables multidisciplinary design teams (spacecraft engineers, thermal engineers, power systems engineers, propulsion engineers, mission analysts) to work simultaneously on a shared spacecraft model with live data updates across all disciplines — the digital backbone of modern concurrent design facilities (CDFs) used in phase A/B1 concept studies for ESA missions.

Starion participates as a product owner in the CDP4 consortium (which includes ESA and RHEA Group), with COMET being Starion's commercial implementation of the open-source CDP4 framework. CDP4-COMET has been used for preliminary design of European Earth observation, telecommunications, science, and navigation missions, and is gaining adoption in commercial satellite design processes. Starion competes with RHEA Group, Terma, and Serco in the European space engineering services market.