A fleet of many small owners
Germany owns 82 active satellites as of October 17, 2026, 0.5% of the world total and the eighth largest national fleet. No operator holds more than 12 of them. The list is long and the owners are small.
Earth imaging is the biggest category with 33 satellites, followed by technology demonstrations with 23 and communications with 16. 61 of the 82, 74%, fly in the lowest orbital band, below 600 km.
What they do
Earth imaging accounts for 33 of Germany's active satellites (40%).
Where they orbit
Who operates them
The largest operators, and the largest families of satellites, owned by Germany.
By operator
By satellite family
Operator names are as written in GCAT, usually transliterated from the original language. Families group satellites by the first word of their name.
How the fleet has grown
At the end of 2005, Germany had 21 payloads in Earth orbit. By the end of 2025 it had 88.
Launches
Germany has made 2 orbital launch attempts since its first in 2025, and 1 of them in 2025. Its busiest year was 2025 with 1.
The first German satellite
Germany's first satellite, Azur, launched on November 8, 1969 on a US Scout B from Vandenberg. A German team led by Ludwig Bolkow built it. It weighed 71 kg and studied the Van Allen belts, solar particles and aurorae, and the last contact with it came on June 29, 1970.
The German Aerospace Center, DLR, dates from 1969 as the DFVLR, renamed DLR in 1989, and in its present form since a 1997 merger with DARA. In practice, the German Space Agency at DLR, based in Bonn, serves as Germany's national space agency and manages German contributions to ESA and EUMETSAT. On the International Space Station, the Columbus laboratory docked in February 2008, and DLR runs the Columbus Control Centre at Oberpfaffenhofen for ESA.
Radar and the big instruments
The most famous German Earth-observation satellite is TerraSAR-X, launched on June 15, 2007 on a Dnepr from Baikonur. It's an imaging radar satellite that provides images with a resolution of up to 1 meter, operated by DLR, in a public-private partnership with the manufacturer EADS Astrium. Its twin, TanDEM-X, followed on June 21, 2010.
The current table is dominated by smaller spacecraft. The operator list reads TUB with 12, ZfT with 9 and AMSAT-D with 4. These are operator codes as GCAT writes them.
Start-ups at the edge of the sky
OroraTech is the largest company on the list, with 10 satellites. It was founded in 2018 as a spin-off of the Technical University of Munich and builds a wildfire detection platform based on thermal infrared measurements from space. Its first satellite, FOREST-1, launched on January 13, 2022.
That's 12% of the German fleet from one company. The largest family name in the German table is OTC, with 8 satellites.
Germany had 21 payloads in orbit at the end of 2005 and 88 at the end of 2025, a rise of 4.2 times. Japan's fleet grew 2.5 times over the same years, and South Korea's 12 times. German growth has come from many small owners and not from one big network.
Germany's own rocket
Germany relies on other countries' rockets: 42 of its 82 active satellites flew on American rockets, 19 on Russian rockets, 8 on Electron rockets credited to New Zealand and 4 on Chinese rockets. Its own launch count is two, and both belong to one company. Isar Aerospace was founded in March 2018, headquartered in Ottobrunn near Munich. Its first Spectrum flight, on March 30, 2025, lifted off from Andoya, Norway. There was an anomaly 30 seconds in: a vent valve opened unexpectedly and attitude control was lost at the start of the roll maneuver.
The second flight, on September 5, 2026, reached orbit and deployed its payloads, described by ESA as the first launch to orbit from continental Europe, with five CubeSats and one experiment. German agencies and companies take part in European launches, but GCAT credits Ariane and Vega flights to France, so the France page shows 354 launches against Germany's two.
For rockets of a similar size, see the Rocket Lab page. For other European fleets, see Italy, and for an Asian comparison, Japan.