ACORDE Technologies – Business Focus
ACORDE Technologies – Business Focus
Publish Date: 2026-07-03 06:14:00
Source Domain: businessfocusmagazine.com
This April you will have probably seen the launch and return of the Artemis II mission, the first crewed mission to fly as far as the moon in over 50 years. What you might not have heard about is another Lunar mission last year, a joint venture between NASA and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment, or LuGRE, saw a navigation receiver on the Moon determine its position using real-time signals from four navigation satellites orbiting Earth: two Galileo satellites and two GPS satellites. In short, this experiment was the first step towards Lunar GPS, part of the necessary foundation for not only taking people to the Moon, but establishing a colony there. It was a huge technical achievement built on collaboration among numerous agencies and experts, and crucial among them were radio-frequency subsystem specialists ACORDE Technologies.
ACORDE was born in 1999 as a spin-off from the University of Cantabria, in northern Spain. When the Indra Group needed to replace American-made components in Spanish military satellite communication terminals, the university’s expertise made it the natural choice to design an alternative.
“When it came time to industrialise and manufacture that solution, rather than hand it back to industry, the founding team decided to create a company,” says Manuel Lobeira, CEO of ACORDE Technologies. “That decision gave us a very clear purpose from day one — to build world-class RF technology in Spain, and to create high-quality engineering jobs in a region that might otherwise have lost that talent.”
A Spanish Signal
Twenty-five years later, ACORDE Technologies employs over 65 people in Santander designing, developing and manufacturing high-performance RF subsystems for satellite communications, electronic warfare, datalinks and space applications — from S-band up to Q-band.
“Our equipment is operating on all six continents, including Antarctica, and some of our modules are heading to the…
