Rendering of ESA’s SAGA cryptographic mission. Photo: Thales Alenia Space

The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded Thales Alenia Space a further contract for the SAGA mission to develop a space-based system for generating cryptographic keys. 

The contract announced Wednesday covers the system definition and preliminary design of a fully European end-to-end quantum key distribution (QKD) system for governmental use under SAGA, the name for the Secure and Cryptographic mission. 

SAGA is the space-based element of the EU’s EuroQCI initiative, which looks to build a secure quantum communication infrastructure spanning the whole EU. Thales has been coordinating with ESA on the SAGA mission since 2020. 

The SAGA mission aims to demonstrate a QKD service via a single Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) QKD satellite. It also involves an access segment made up of four SpaceQCI access nodes distributed across Europe; and a control segment responsible for system operation, integrated with the terrestrial EuroQCI infrastructure.

“With SAGA, our aim is to ambitiously advance satellite communications, furthering Europe’s digital sovereignty, cybersecurity and industrial competitiveness in the quantum era. We are delighted to strengthen our partnership with Thales Alenia Space, which puts our Member States at the forefront of the race for truly secure connectivity,” said Laurent Jaffart, director of ESA’s Connectivity and Secure Communications.

Thales has a number of space/quantum projects in the works including a QKD system from Geostationary Orbit called QKD-GEO, and two other missions QINSAT and TeQuants.