EUDIS Defence Hackathon 2025

From 17–19 October 2025, the EUDIS Defence Hackathon lands at Unmanned Valley. Over one weekend, you’ll team up with innovators from across the Netherlands to create solutions for some of Europe’s toughest defence and aerospace challenges.

With a prize pool of €5,000, winning in Noordwijk means your team moves on to the European mentorship programme and gets the chance to pitch directly to EU Member State representatives. This is more than a competition — it’s an entry point into Europe’s defence innovation network. The Dutch edition is organised by Groundstation.Space together with the Ministry of Defence, NL Space Campus, SBIC Noordwijk, TNO, NLR, and InnovationQuarter. Security Delta (HSD) is proud to be endorsing partner.

The Autumn 2025 edition of the hackathon will be structured around a central theme, subdivided into three distinct challenges. Each challenge will be supported by local organisers through makeathon capabilities, enabling rapid prototyping and hands-on development in both hardware and software domains.

With adversaries developing anti-satellite weapons, orbital jammers, and cyberattacks, Europe's space assets (navigation, communications, and Earth observation) are under threat. An interesting challenge of the Dutch edition in regards to our community is 'challenge 1'. It addresses the need for solutions that contribute to protect space assets from fast-developing threats through detection and analysis capacity (support to space domain awareness) and countermeasures.

Among others, participants could:

• Simulate innovative detection systems (in orbit, from ground),
• Develop data processing solutions, APIs, algorithms, visualisation interfaces, prototypes for anomaly / threat detection and analysis in space,
• Develop protective technologies,
• Simulate countermeasure systems (defensive or offensive).

Click here to read more about all the challenges.