A Quarter Century of Space Technology from Munich
December 2025
HPS GmbH — 25 Years “The Team to Trust”
The Munich-based space technology forge HPS GmbH celebrated its 25th company anniversary in 2025. Over a quarter of a century, HPS has, through its own efforts, developed from a small SME specialising in high-performance structures into a highly sought-after equipment and subsystem supplier across Europe, delivering demanding projects and missions for institutional clients (such as ESA and DLR), as well as commercial and defence customers, with the most innovative technologies.
Today, HPS is the leading address for precision-driven antennas, mechanics, thermal subsystem expertise, and lightweight structural technologies, for example as a valued subsystem-prime in flagship projects such as the LDRS development for the Copernicus-CIMR mission, supplier of critical signal intelligence antenna arrays, or development partner for serial MGSE solar arrays in the IRIS2 programme. At the same time, HPS is advancing active sustainability solutions for orbit with its own space debris solutions, such as the ADEO dragsail.
Furthermore, HPS is committed to driving forward Europe’s technological non-dependence and to developing products that previously had to be procured expensively from outside the continent. An outstanding example is the ultra-fine metal meshes of the highest precision at the micrometre level, known under the technical term Universal Space Mesh (USM), which, thanks to their combination of electrical conductivity and mechanical elasticity, are ideally suited for applications such as climate research, telecommunications, and Earth observation. On the looms of HPTex GmbH, the joint venture founded by HPS and Iprotex in Münchberg (Bavaria) in 2020, tailor-made MESH solutions are now being produced for the specific requirements of customers from all over the world—solutions found nowhere else.
Already four years earlier, HPS had established its Bucharest-based subsidiary High Performance Structures Inovatie si Dezvoltare S.R.L. (HPS-Romania) alongside its Munich headquarters, particularly for the development and production of mechanical and thermal space equipment, multi-layer insulation (MLI), secondary and tertiary structures, MGSE (Mechanical Ground Support Equipment), and antenna components, as well as engineering and integration services. This highly specialised team supports the growing Romanian space industry as well as key European missions (such as METOP-SG, BIOMASS, JUICE, SENTINEL 4, LISA) in the areas of design & engineering, production, and integration in their own clean rooms.
Altogether, HPS now employs a core workforce of 90 people in Munich, Bucharest, and Münchberg—with numbers rising, as additional specialists of all backgrounds are sought in Germany and Romania to tackle the various technological challenges posed by the rapidly expanding market that German, European, and global spaceflight presents to HPS.
“We look back with great gratitude on 25 years in which we have translated technological and mission requirements into functioning hardware with outstanding partners. Founded in 2000 by the two visionaries Reiner Klett (Kayser-Threde GmbH) and Professor Breitbach (INVENT GmbH), we have consistently followed the path of an organically growing SME independent of VC capital. Mainly supported by the many technology programmes of ESA and the national initiatives carried out within the German space programme, we are now firmly established in the market with our high-end products and are simultaneously scaling up for serial markets. In addition, we are consistently investing in sustainable solutions for the future of spaceflight, especially in LEO, so that we can contribute to avoiding space debris,” says Dr.-Ing. Ernst K. Pfeiffer, Managing Partner of HPS. “We have already achieved much, and we see even more ahead of us. We look forward to it.”
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. And we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for placing your trust in us over the past 25 years at HPS, whether in the short or long term, as a customer, partner, subcontractor or employee.
Without you, we would not be where we are today with our high-tech products used in space.
THANK YOU!
