Not a breakthrough, just evolution: SpaceForest on SAR radars and the PERUN rocket

In the debate around Polish space technology, the word "breakthrough" gets thrown around about as often as it does at every new smartphone launch. Marcin Sarnowski, sales and marketing director at Gdynia-based SpaceForest, treats the term with the measured skepticism of an engineer who has spent more than a decade working on satellite systems, SAR radars, and Poland's first large suborbital rocket.

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18 may 2026   |   11:27   |   Source: Gazeta Morska   |   Prepared by: Kamil Kusier   |   Print

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- Sitting inside this, I see how it comes together and how it's built step by step. I don't see one turning point that I could call a breakthrough, Marcin Sarnowski emphasises.

At the same time, he notes that the view from the outside can look very different.

- If someone hasn't seen this kind of work before and suddenly hears that a small Polish company is building a space rocket and its own observation radar, that can genuinely be impressive. But for us, it's the result of twenty years of work, not a spectacular leap.

From base-station servicing to the European Space Agency

SpaceForest, today one of the most recognisable players in Poland's space-tech sector, started out in 2004 in a completely different reality. Trading under its original name, Telemobile Electronics, the Gdynia firm provided service work for telecom operators - mainly repairing BTS base-station components as an unauthorised service provider. That work forced a habit which now pays off in an entirely different industry: taking a problem apart from first principles, with no manufacturer documentation to lean on.

The other pillar of those early years was software for tuning microwave filters using machine-learning algorithms - at a time when the industry broadly held that filter tuning could only be done by hand. The project was partly funded by Poland's National Centre for Research and Development (NCBR), and the resulting solution remains one of the company's flagship products to this day.

The turning point - if we're going to talk about breakthroughs at all - came when Poland joined the European Space Agency in 2012. SpaceForest spotted a niche: advanced space electronics. In the years that followed, the company delivered for ESA, among other things, a semiconductor power amplifier in the X band, an ultra-low-noise frequency generator (PLDRO), and a doubly redundant medium-power signal source (MLO) - all qualified to TRL 7. It also contributed to the test environment for the onboard data-handling system of ESA's JUICE mission, the probe studying Jupiter's moons.

- Building this kind of hardware comes with a whole series of technological challenges tied to the conditions in orbit, which are completely different from those on Earth. The hardware has to operate reliably in a harsh environment for many years, because servicing it in orbit simply isn't possible, Marcin Sarnowski says.

Today SpaceForest employs around fifty specialists - RF engineers, mechanical engineers, electronics engineers, software developers, and a commercialisation team. In 2025 the firm collected three statuettes at the Pomeranian Gryphon Economic Awards: Innovation Leader in the micro and small enterprise category, Investment Leader, and the Media Gryphon.

SAR radar an integration of competencies, not a single technological leap

The first of SpaceForest's two key product lines today is the HUSSAR family of radar systems - compact synthetic-aperture (SAR) radars operating in the X band (9-11 GHz) and delivering resolutions down to 15 centimetres. A product that an outside observer might well call "breakthrough" is, in the company's own telling, more a case of maturing evolution.

- It's a breakthrough product in a sense, but not because it appeared out of nowhere - rather because it integrates technologies we'd developed earlier across different projects: amplifiers, generators, advanced electronics, antenna components. These are elements we've been delivering to satellite systems for years, Marcin Sarnowski explains.

The key was the synthesis of competencies, not a single technological leap.

It's worth noting that the HUSSAR radar is the result of SpaceForest's collaboration with Warsaw-based XY-Sensing, which contributed its expertise in signal processing and radar project development. The HUSSAR project showed how important cooperation between Polish entities is to bringing a product to market quickly.

- Everything was brought together into a single system, and only then did it yield the product we have today.

The HUSSAR line comes in three main variants. HUSSAR DRONE is an ultra-light SAR/GMTI radar for small and medium unmanned aerial vehicles with payload capacities starting from just a few kilograms - including rotary-wing platforms. HUSSAR INTEGRATED is a version built directly into the airframe, improving aerodynamics, extending mission time, and offering better protection for the electronics. HUSSAR POD is the classic pod, mounted under the wing or fuselage of larger drones, helicopters, and manned aircraft.

Regardless of configuration, all variants support the standard SAR modes: Stripmap, Spotlight, GMTI (Ground Moving Target Indication), MMTI (Maritime Moving Target Indication), and CCD (Coherent Change Detection) - which makes it possible to detect changes in the terrain between successive radar passes.

"Radar sees where optics gives up"

The biggest advantage SAR technology has over optical systems is its independence from weather and time of day.

- Optical systems, including infrared, work very well in favourable conditions. Radar complements them in a crucial way - where you need to 'look' through clouds, at night, through smoke, or through fog and see what's happening on the ground, Marcin Sarnowski tells our publication.

That property gives SAR an exceptionally broad range of applications, including:

• monitoring floods, forest fires, and other natural disasters,
• terrain mapping and detection of environmental change,
• military reconnaissance and surveillance,
• monitoring of critical infrastructure, including ports and terminals,
• structural-health assessment of engineering works such as bridges and buildings,
• observation of sea areas and the detection and tracking of vessels.

Sarnowski stresses that SAR radar can detect even small structural deformations - invaluable information for monitoring port infrastructure, bridges, and hydrotechnical facilities. Another important capability is precise geolocation of imaged objects: radar data can give coordinates accurate enough for operational use.

- Radar lets you assess more than optics can. Optics will show you a vehicle or a tent. SAR radar can add information about the surrounding structure, motion, and changes that the naked eye or a conventional camera simply won't pick up, he explains.

Complementarity, not competition: drone, aircraft, satellite

A recurring question in the public debate is whether aerial and unmanned systems are "displacing" satellites. SpaceForest takes a very different view.

- The satellite image is stable - it's a fixed reference point, you could say. An aerial platform, especially an unmanned one, gives you operational advantage, because you can send it exactly where you need it, exactly when you need it, Marcin Sarnowski explains.

The flexibility of mobile systems matters most in crisis situations.

- If we see something suspicious, we can change the radar's operating mode remotely and focus on a specific area, increasing resolution and the depth of analysis. With a satellite, we have to wait for the next pass.

This is where a context particularly relevant to Pomerania's maritime economy comes in. SAR mounted on UAVs makes it possible to track vehicles and vessels - commercial ships, naval units, but also so-called "dark vessels", ships that switch off their AIS transponders. In the context of the Baltic, the "shadow fleet", and incidents affecting subsea infrastructure (cables, gas pipelines), this kind of observational capability is taking on strategic weight.

In March 2026, Poland launched two more MikroSAR radar satellites as part of the POLSARIS constellation now being built - a nationally controlled Earth-observation capability. SpaceForest stresses that a country's own observation systems - both satellite and airborne - are today one of the state's key assets in the security domain.

   

PERUN: a Polish suborbital rocket as a technology service

The firm's second strategic pillar is PERUN - the largest Polish suborbital rocket and one of the most serious projects in the country's space sector. The vehicle is 11.5 metres long, 45 centimetres in diameter, and has a launch mass approaching one tonne. It is powered by SpaceForest's in-house SF-1000 hybrid engine, using modified paraffin as fuel and nitrous oxide (N₂O) as oxidiser. The solution is described as environmentally friendly and significantly safer than classic solid propellants based on perchlorates.

- PERUN is ultimately meant to lift up to fifty kilograms of payload to about a hundred and fifty kilometres of altitude and return safely to Earth. On paper, that's a competitive platform for microgravity research, Marcin Sarnowski says.

Crucially, PERUN was designed as a reusable system. After flight, the rocket comes back on a parachute, the payload is recovered, and the key components - including the engine's combustion chamber and the electronics - are prepared for the next mission. A single unit is meant to enable at least five flights. This approach, familiar from America's New Shepard or Europe's MAIA Space, is critical to bringing down the cost of space experiments.

The rocket is also fitted with a thrust-vectoring system (TVC), a gas-dynamic stabilisation system that uses compressed air to create optimal microgravity conditions, and proprietary space-grade onboard electronics.

- The development of the system was iterative. We started with small demonstrators - one of them reached about ten kilometres - and then moved on to bigger structures. We drew on what we do best: electronics, microwave engineering, antenna technology, says SpaceForest's sales and marketing director.

From telecoms to rocket propulsion

SpaceForest's rocket expertise has its roots in telecoms. In the middle of the last decade, the company joined the European DEWI consortium under the Artemis programme, which brought together more than fifty firms from thirteen countries. Together with Thales Alenia Space, the Gdynia team developed a wireless sensor network designed to replace conventional cabling in the European Ariane launcher. The outcome was not only a technology - intended to reduce rocket mass and therefore launch costs — but also a demonstrator: a small sounding rocket called CANDLE2 and an autonomous tracking and communications system known as RASEL.

- We had to build a demonstrator, and that was the moment when the first rocket in our history came into being. It started with sensors and ended with propulsion, Marcin Sarnowski recalls.

In time, the company took a strategic decision.

- If we're good at designing and integrating systems, the natural step was to move into a completely new business area - one that no Polish company had yet taken on: building and commercialising our own space rockets.

The PERUN project formally launched in 2018 under the SIR programme (Suborbital Inexpensive Rocket), co-financed from European funds through Poland's Smart Growth track at NCBR.

Three flights from Ustka and the lessons that came with them

PERUN has three test flights on record, all from the Polish Air Force Central Training Ground in Ustka.

June 2023: the first full-scale flight. The rocket reached an altitude of around 22 km. After minor anomalies appeared, the mission was aborted and the parachute system brought the vehicle safely back to the ground. Most components were recovered, along with the full telemetry data set.

Autumn 2023: the second flight, reaching around 13 km. Again, test objectives were not fully met, but the company collected another set of flight and recovery data.

22 November 2025: the third flight, altitude around 20 km, mission duration 277.2 seconds (including descent). The rocket's payload bay was loaded with a mix of research and commercial experiments: among them the ThOR project, which studied the effects of vibration, acceleration, and microgravity on algae, yeast, and fruit-fly larvae using Organ-on-Chip technology; the RESQ project, testing the stability of tourniquets under suborbital flight conditions; and a test of SpaceForest's own space-grade electronics. Although the planned altitude of 50 km was not reached, the flight did validate payload integration, the operation of the thrust-vectoring system (TVC), and the onboard safety system.

- We work step by step, because that's the only way to keep complex systems under control and develop them properly. If we tried to get everything at once, we wouldn't see any of the intermediate results, Marcin Sarnowski comments. - And it's those results that matter.

Under a contract with the European Space Agency, in the BOOST! programme for commercial space transport services, SpaceForest has received EUR 2.4 million in support. In return, it has committed to conducting four PERUN flights, to altitudes of 50, 80, 100, and 150 km, by the end of 2026.

Three launches, three locations and the Polish dream of a spaceport

SpaceForest's plans for 2026 are ambitious: three PERUN flights from three different sites from Poland (Ustka), from the Azores (in cooperation with Portugal's Atlantic Spaceport Consortium), and from Denmark, from a sea platform operated by EuroSpaceport. The aim is twofold: to meet the ESA commitments, and to prove that PERUN is versatile and can operate from a range of launch environments, including at sea.

For Pomerania, the Tri-City, and Ustka, this is a strategically significant thread. At the Gryphon Economic Awards ceremony, CEO Robert Magiera said it openly:

- We hope that what we are doing has a chance to become a Pomeranian specialisation, that it will help us promote our region across Europe. But we're counting on help from the authorities, because we could really use a spaceport. One could be built, for instance, at the training ground in Ustka.

It is a topic that resurfaces in Poland's space debate at regular intervals. PERUN is tested today within launch windows agreed with the military; pre-launch preparations take more than seven hours. A permanent facility would substantially shorten that time and bring operating costs down.

SAR and rockets are still at the start of the road

Despite being in its third decade, the company's sales and marketing director avoids any tone of triumph.

- Radar technologies are still only at the start of their development, Marcin Sarnowski stresses. - And that's true of both observational SAR and the space-object detection systems we're also working on. This is just the beginning of that technological path.

One thought runs through the whole conversation: the development of advanced technology isn't a one-off leap, it's a process.

- From the outside, you see the big launches. From the inside, you see hundreds of small decisions, dozens of tests, dozens of failed attempts. And those are what build the system that, in the end, has a chance of flying into space, or of seeing a fogged-in port from a drone.

For a region that has lived from the sea for centuries, that logic is familiar. A ship is not built in a single gesture. It is built section by section, in the yard, step by step. Poland's new space industry, if it is to succeed, will be built the same way.

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SpaceForest radar SAR HUSSAR rakieta PERUN polski sektor kosmiczny technologie kosmiczne Gdynia

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