About Us

Aurora is founded

The history of Aurora Technology starts in 1995 with our Managing Director and company founder, Alex Jeanes. Based on his experience in supporting both ESTEC and ESOC working on the ISO satellite Telecommunication Systems, XMM-Newton requirements and verifications, and INTEGRAL science mission planning system, Aurora Technology started supporting the Space Science Directorate at ESTEC.
First employees hired were Kevin Galloway working as engineer and Diane Barton, who worked to support the HR administration. They are still Aurora employees!
The business model was to supplying engineering and software consultancy services.

Delivering quality instead of quantity

In the years, the company stably growth contributing to the success of several ESA missions.
Due to Alex’s familiarity in Space Science, he mainly recruited Scientists – at that time working in ESTEC. Aurora had a competitive advantage as they started to establish themselves, being more focussed on delivering quality instead of quantity, also having a low overhead, which was attractive for the customer.

Aurora and LSE join forces

When in 2006 a large part of the Science Directorate moved to ESAC in Spain, Alex decided to focus on working full time in Aurora management, giving up his technical role. At that time, there were approximately a stable number of 15 people in the company.
It started to become clear that ESA preferred doing business with bigger companies and in 2008 there was a first collaboration with LSE GmbH to compete for the frame contract. LSE GmbH was bought few years before (in 2004) by SSC - Swedish Space Corporation. They had heard of Aurora’s good reputation and approached Alex to join forces. This resulted in Aurora becoming Prime in EOP and winning 10 extra manpower, a huge success and instant growth! Aurora at this time enjoyed a very good reputation and a name for being responsive, fast and professional for both the client and employees working onsite

Aurora enters in the SSC Group

After the numerous successful collaborations with LSE GmbH – Alex sold the company to them in 2010. He explained that selling your company is much easier when you don’t need to market or promote to potential buyers. Alex stayed as Managing Director of Aurora, which became a subsidiary of SSC.

Let's focus on business development

Aurora is now a company of about 36 people. Since Aurora was founded, Alex had recruited and hired everyone in the company but - after approximately 20 years - it was time to handover such role.
Davide Starnone was then hired as a Business Manager. He joined in November 2015 bringing to Aurora the right mix of engineering technical skills and managerial experience. Davide suddenly demonstrated to be successful in growing the business of the company.

Embracing a new business strategy

In the beginning - when Aurora was founded - it was more about maintaining a steady growth and keeping the company’s good reputation that was really the aim. However, as time has passed new developments within ESA have also resulted in new strategies for Aurora. Although its historically a strong link to ESA SCI and EOP domains – it became clear that to grow, Aurora would have to penetrate other domains within ESA and for that the company teamed up with ATG Europe and Telespazio Belgium, embracing a new business strategy for the EFC2 bidding process. This concretized in successfully winning the new ESA EFC2 Frame contract as Prime in 5 activity domains and subcontractor in all the other 20 domains. Being part of a consortia that has access to all domains in ESA has resulted in an exponential growth for Aurora – practically tripling the company size in less than 4 years.

Becoming a key partner for ESA

Aurora continues to grow reaching about 80 employees at the end of 2019.
Aurora’s performances are the outcome of a clear strategy which is positioning ourselves even more as a strategic key partner for our client – the European Space Agency – to whom we offer a service ready to meet the most demanding engineering and scientific goals.
To keep on, this incredible growth needs continuous consolidation through new processes, innovative solutions and internal reorganization activity. Up to now the structure has been maintained very lean playing catch up with the growth. Nowadays, the structure needs to be robust to support the overall increment of employees and the widened domain areas. On 17th of November 2020, the shareholders meeting appointed Davide Starnone as Managing Director for Aurora Technology, which will lead the company together with Alex.

More than 100!

In partnership with RHEA, Aurora successfully won the bid at ESAC in mid-2021, reaching the size of 115+ employees and managing also subcontracting companies in both ESTEC and ESAC. Company's Revenue is now of about 15 M€.
ESA announce that EFC2 contract has been extended until end of 2024, giving Aurora a clear target for the future to develop an effective strategy for the EFC3.
We look to the future with commitment, passion, and competence to keep the Company as an excellence in the Space market.