SpaceX escaped bankruptcy, in its infancy, by a miraculous contract with Nasa. Kleos Space will not have this “luck.” The company was invited in 2017 to settle in Luxembourg as part of ’s (LSAP) “new space” policy. After months of financial difficulties, Kleos Space indicated at the Sydney Stock Exchange, where it was listed, on Tuesday 25 July that it would not be able to find “temporary” financing while waiting for potential cash inflows.

“The company’s board has had no alternative but to acknowledge that the company is unable to meet its financial commitments as they fall due, and that there is no prospect of viable alternative financial accommodation and will, accordingly, petition the relevant commercial district court in Luxembourg for a bankruptcy adjudication. The company is preparing documentation to support the petition, which must be filed within 30 days. Further details, including contact details of any bankruptcy receiver appointed, will be provided once and if the petition has been adjudicated,” said the authorised by Kleos Space’s CEO Alan Khalili on 26 July.

At the beginning of June, Kleos announced that it wanted to use €400,000 of the debt facility of 10m Australian dollars (€6.1m) with Pure Asset Management to try to get out of this rut.

Cumulative losses of more than €7.3m

If the company was not in good standing with its Luxembourg obligations, Kleos had declared revenues of €272,000 in 2022, an increase of 117%, with cumulative losses of more than €7.3m to the ASX. According to Paperjam’s calculations, the Luxembourg state had invested €1m to €1.5m in the company, which employed 22 people.

In its annual report, Kleos Space explained that the Luxembourg Space Agency had terminated its spectrum license and then extended it for two months until the end of February, before renewing it after a new administrative phase.

In the first quarter, Kleos Space announced that it had recorded revenues of more than €1m and was in the process of finalising several contracts--one with an American agency, another with a British agency and a third in Europe. It had also signed an agreement with the British Ursa Space Systems to take part in world’s largest bank of high-quality satellite images.

Nine of the 16 satellites that Kleos Space launched into orbit have developed potentially serious problems or will become useless by the end of 2024, said Kleos Space, quoted by , which first announced the bankruptcy.

In early July, founders Andy Bowyer and Peter Round returned to the helm of their company, housed in Parc Luxite.

This story was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.