A third commercial contract in 16 months gives Spain's Arkadia Space the customer track record it needs to make green propulsion a credible choice for prime satellite builders.
Spain's Arkadia Space has landed a third commercial customer for its hydrogen-peroxide thrusters, with Berlin-based Reflex Aerospace contracting the startup to provide propulsion and end-of-life deorbiting for a 200-kilogram satellite manifested on SpaceX's Transporter-20 rideshare, a shared Falcon 9 launch that carries dozens of small satellites at once, no earlier than the second quarter of 2027.
The deal, announced June 9 by SpaceNews, packages 5-newton thrusters, a propellant tank, and electronics around a propellant, high-test hydrogen peroxide (HTP), that Arkadia frames as a "green," non-toxic alternative to hydrazine. Hydrazine remains the workhorse of satellite maneuvering, but it is acutely toxic, requires specialized handling, and in CEO Francho Garcia's telling is facing pressure from range and rideshare restrictions, with SpaceX limiting hydrazine-bearing spacecraft on certain campaigns.
Reflex chief executive Walter Ballheimer framed the choice as much about geography as chemistry. He told SpaceNews that Arkadia's European, ITAR-free status, outside the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations that govern American-built defense-related hardware, gave Reflex a propulsion supplier free of the U.S. export-control regime, a hedge he tied directly to supply-chain independence. Ballheimer also pointed to flight-proven green propulsion, a modular thruster design, and Arkadia's willingness to adapt the package to Reflex's bus on a short timeline.
The flight heritage is thin but real. Arkadia's thruster line traces to DARK, a hosted payload that flew on a D-Orbit transfer vehicle in March 2025 and fired its engine in space for the first time. Garcia said the campaign produced sub-second pulses and steady-state burns of up to five seconds that matched ground-test data.
The Reflex contract lands against a pattern of wins for a company that had 28 employees when DARK launched and is now projecting 40 to 45 by the end of 2026 and 70 by the end of 2027. In February 2025, MaiaSpace picked Arkadia to provide reaction-control-system thrusters, the small engines used to point and orient a spacecraft, for its reusable launcher, and in April Dassault Aviation contracted the startup for the VORTEX-D spaceplane technology demonstrator. SpaceNews reports Arkadia is targeting roughly 10 million euros (about $11.6 million) in 2026 contracts and is in the middle of a Series A round that the company has not yet announced as closed.
Garcia told SpaceNews that Arkadia has already turned down at least one U.S. customer on schedule grounds and expects its first American order this year. He also pushed back on the long-running U.S. skepticism toward hydrogen peroxide, which he attributes to early experimental programs such as the X-15 rather than to any operational record. Arkadia, he said, has run HTP systems for years without incident.
The startup is moving into a 2,000-square-meter production facility and has bid for a European Space Agency mission slot that would put two HTP-propelled spacecraft in orbit near the end of the decade, according to SpaceNews. Reflex's satellite will be the first to fly Arkadia's thrusters as primary propulsion on a production bus. The MaiaSpace and Dassault wins are reaction-control-system work.
Whether one hosted-payload test plus two reaction-control-system wins translates into a primary-propulsion track record will not be clear until the Reflex bus operates on orbit in 2027. Until then, Arkadia's case rests on a green propellant with a clean ground and flight record, a customer list that has just stopped being European-only, and a supply-chain argument that satellite builders outside the U.S. export regime are starting to find harder to ignore.