Three days at RAI Amsterdam devoted to the European small satellite industry, split across a business agenda, a defence agenda and a peer-reviewed technical programme, with an exhibition floor running alongside.
SmallSat Europe is the European small satellite exhibition and conference, held at RAI Amsterdam. The 2027 edition runs from 1 to 3 June. It is organised by SatNews, the satellite industry publisher, and follows editions held in Amsterdam in 2025 and in May 2026. The 2026 edition reported around 2,500 attendees and more than 200 exhibitors from over 40 countries, with support from sponsors including Airbus Defence and Space, ArianeGroup and OHB. The programme is organised around three parallel tracks: a business agenda covering commercial strategy, investment and deal-making, a defence agenda covering national security and dual-use applications, and a peer-reviewed technical programme covering engineering and operations.
For twenty years small satellites were a sub-track at general space conferences, on the reasonable grounds that a cubesat and a geostationary communications satellite belonged to the same industry. That is no longer obviously true. Constellation economics, launch procurement, qualification standards and supply chains have all diverged from the traditional mission model, to the point where a smallsat manufacturer learns very little from a session on a flagship science mission.
SmallSat Europe is the European expression of that divergence, and its rapid growth to a 2,500-person event in two editions is the evidence that the separation was overdue. The equivalent split has already happened in the United States, where the Utah smallsat conference has run for decades.
The business track covers commercial strategy, financing and the consolidation now working through the European smallsat supplier base. The defence track reflects the shift that has reshaped the whole sector since 2022: proliferated small satellite constellations are now a defence procurement category rather than a commercial curiosity, and European rearmament budgets are funding them. The technical programme is peer reviewed, which puts it closer to an academic conference than to a trade show stage and gives engineers a reason to attend that a sponsor-led programme would not.
Bremen is the general European space supply chain fair, covering every mission class. SmallSat Europe is narrower and covers the small satellite segment across business, defence and engineering. A component supplier selling into both will often do both; a constellation operator will find Amsterdam more directly relevant.
The exhibitor and attendee base is international, with more than 40 countries represented in 2026, but the market focus and the sponsor base are European.
The technical track is peer reviewed, which implies a call for papers with a submission deadline ahead of the event. Watch the official site for the 2027 call.
SatNews is a satellite industry publisher that moved into events. As with the ground segment conference in London, a publisher-run event tends to build its programme around editorial judgement of what the industry needs to discuss, which is visible here in the decision to run a peer-reviewed technical track alongside the commercial floor.
The smallsat community stopped borrowing floor space at general space fairs and built its own, which is what a market looks like when it reaches scale.
Registration for the 2027 edition had not opened at the verification date and no rates were published. The 2026 edition ran an early bird period that closed on 10 April 2026, with standard pricing after that, so the same pattern is a reasonable planning assumption: expect registration to open in the winter and the discount window to close roughly two months before the June dates. Exhibition space and sponsorship are quoted directly by the organiser, and the larger stands at the 2026 edition were taken by the European primes.
1 to 3 June 2027 at RAI Amsterdam, Europaplein 24, 1078 GZ Amsterdam.
Not published for 2027 at the verification date. The 2026 edition used an early bird and standard pricing structure.
RAI has its own station on the Amsterdam ring rail line and a metro stop on line 52, roughly ten minutes from Schiphol by direct train and about ten minutes from Amsterdam Centraal by metro.
Amsterdam is busy from late spring onwards and RAI events fill the nearby Zuidas hotels quickly. Book at the same time as your pass rather than after.
| Official website | https://smallsateurope.com/ |
| Organiser | https://satnews.com/ |