A rendering of the view of the Middle East from Space. (NASA via Getty)
BEIRUT — An industry team tasked with launching a small satellite constellation for the United Arab Emirates wants to get its first bird into low Earth orbit (LEO) as early as the end of next year or early 2027, according to a key industry executive.
The industry consortium is in the “last stages” of selecting a launch partner from the three finalists out of an original 10 international entities that had been under consideration, Waleid Al Mesmari, president of the space and cyber tech division of the sprawling Emirati defense conglomerate EDGE Group, told Breaking Defense last month.
EDGE’s new space-focused subsidiary FADA is the leader of the consortium, which also includes national entities Space 42, the National Space Science and Technology Center and the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre.
The goal of the project, called Sirb in a reference to the Arabic term for flock of birds, is to eventually put three UAE-made synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites into LEO to “address the critical need for better environmental and land usage monitoring, data collection and analysis to meet today’s global challenges,” according to the UAE Space Agency.
“The planned satellites will be able to create highly detailed and complex radar ‘images’ of land use, ice cover, surface changes and characterization, with a wide range of scientific, civil and commercial applications,” the agency says in an online fact sheet.
But Al Mesmari said the information acquired through the constellation will have have “defense and national security applications” as well.
FADA, which means space in Arabic, was only established in September 2024 as the first endeavor into space by EDGE, a conglomerate of nearly 30 subsidiaries with interests in everything from small arms to unmanned systems to armored vehicles.
“When it comes to establishment of FADA, [it is] to have a sovereign capability that can protect and preserve the prosperous future [of UAE] that has been built over the last 50 years,” Al Mesmari told Breaking Defense.
He said that FADA aims to have “a national capacity building program that can translate, and lead the space technological stack, enabling us to have a sovereign capability at the end.” He added that FADA is one of the companies that will contribute to UAE’s space strategy 2030, focused on localizing technology in UAE.
During the International Defense Exhibition and Conference (IDEX) 2025, during which Breaking Defense spoke to Al Mesmari, FADA said it had launched a “hyper-smart platform” dubbed TACTICA, which is an AI-based software that “processes multi-source intelligence- including satellite imagery, signals intelligence, sensor data, and open-source information.”
Al Mesmari expected that FADA “will be a global player [in the space sector] and that’s our focus.”
He concluded that FADA is “a vertically integrated company, which means that we will focus on building capabilities across the three streams: space platforms [including] space payloads [and] manufacturing capabilities, remote sensing, [which include] capabilities on the ground with the different applications, [and] space situational awareness or space domain awareness.”
