Europe’s Falcon Moment: Five Recommendations to Create the Conditions for Europe’s Own SpaceX

Executive Summary

SpaceX's roughly $1.75 trillion IPO valuation is the latest wake-up call of how far Europe has fallen behind in the space sector. Isar Aerospace, Europe's largest NewSpace launcher and rising star, raised at a valuation near €2 billion, clearly significant, yet still a rounding error by comparison. The structural gaps are just as stark: the United States outspends the EU and its member states by about 6.5 to 1, out-launched Europe 145 to 3 in 2024, and a single American operator, Starlink, now runs more than half of all active satellites. European and member states’ space budgets sit at record highs, with ESA's €22.1 billion three-year plan and Germany's €35 billion national commitment, yet every additional euro is met by a larger multiple in American spending, and the gap keeps widening. 

This affects civilian services as much as defense capabilities, as both rely on the same technical infrastructure: Satellites that let the NewSpace venture OroraTech detect wildfires instantly from space are the same class that supports NATO reconnaissance, and most of the projected $1.8 trillion space economy by 2035 sits in downstream civilian applications. But Europe falls short of institutional structures for frontier research and a late-stage capital path to carry launcher and constellation firms to scale. It also lacks a standards body for orbital interoperability. Its dependencies on non-European launch and satellite services remain unmapped and untested, a vulnerability the loss of Soyuz and the Starlink restrictions over Ukraine already exposed.

This brief offers five recommendations for President von der Leyen and Commissioner Kubilius. The goal is to turn existing investment into frontier innovation and civilian autonomy by 2035, and to do so in a way that reduces dependency on volatile partners while preserving the international partnerships that remain to serve European interests.

Key Assessments:

• Europe lacks the institutional capabilities to foster innovative frontier space research. DARPA funds work on new ways of using orbit, placing bets that capture value in the United States, while ESA mostly operates under cost-plus and geographic-return rules that select against frontier risk and for established incumbents. Germany's SPRIN-D is arguably the only agency in an EU member state running the DARPA logic in practice but is not designed to invest in defense/space technology.¹ The Commission should support the founding of Space-RIN-EU, an intergovernmental frontier-research consortium modeled on Airbus with a 1-billion-euro annual budget (recommendation 1).
• While European private and public space investments are rising, the gap to the U.S. is still widening, especially in the commercial sector.  Despite record funding announcements in EU private and public sectors, U.S. space investment growth is clearly outpacing Europe’s, with the biggest gap being the commercial sector. To build a counterweight, the Commission should establish a 5-billion-euro EU Late-Stage Space Investment Fund, modeled on the NATO Innovation Fund, paired with an innovation-friendly procurement framework (recommendation 2).
• Sustained European space investment depends on cross-country public support that is politically fragile and failure-sensitive today. European programs are framed and reported mainly as defense spending, even though most of the projected 1.8 trillion U.S. dollar space economy by 2035 sits in downstream civilian services (e.g., flood monitoring, wildfire detection, etc.). This weakens their standing in neutral member states and military-sceptic, failure-averse populations. The Commission should reframe space as a civilian public-good mission and institutionalize a European failure culture that is crucial for NewSpace launchers (recommendation 3).
• Europe's dependency on non-European space services has become very clear recently but still has not been properly mapped or regularly tested. Europe still has no numerical account of how many Member-State military channels route through commercial U.S. constellations, or what replacing each dependency would cost. The Commission should publish annual robustness tests of these dependencies (recommendation 4).
• Fragmentation is the largest single source of inefficiency in European space procurement. ESA's geographic-return principle spreads scarce engineering capacity across redundant national programs, and every constellation shipping with a proprietary command interface, encryption stack, adds duplicative cost. The Commission should mandate binding cross-border interoperability standards for satellite platforms, ground segments, refueling, and secure data interfaces (recommendation 5).

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Fabian Sedlmayr and Robert Platow

 

I. Background and Why the Time to Act Is Now

The Problem: Europe Is Far Behind

Strategic capabilities in multiple dimensions need to be considered when rethinking a European approach to space. Space always was (and still is) a military domain, as the head of the Bundeswehr Space Command, Brigadier General Michael Traut, has put it.² The change in recent years is the profitable commercialization and industrialization of orbit, and its integration into civilian critical infrastructure at a scale that did not exist a decade ago. 

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Fabian Sedlmayr and Robert Platow

The general importance of space for Europe can be exemplified along three pillars:

Defense capabilities: Space has become a warfighting domain. Positioning, communications, early warning, and reconnaissance satellites underpin modern military operation. States without access to these capabilities cannot credibly defend themselves.

Economic opportunity: Space is one of the fastest-growing industrial sectors in the world economy, which applies to the building, launch, and operation of satellites but also for the direct applications it enables and the greater industry benefits that are linked to progress in space technology. It furthermore builds on the advanced manufacturing and precision-engineering strengths existing in Europe already today. 

Sovereign autonomy: As space technology has become crucial for defense but also for civilian economic activity, everyday life could not continue if access to these capabilities is cut-off. Without its own launch, satellite, and constellation capabilities, Europe depends on non-European actors, both state actors and private companies.

Yet, Europe is far behind in the space race, which becomes visible with government funding for space-related activities. The United States, with a GDP 1.5 times larger than the EU’s, outspends the EU institutions and EU member countries' combined space spending by roughly 6.5 to 1. 

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The EU has begun to take this seriously. France’s 2025-2040 National Space Strategy treats space as a military domain and pillar of national sovereignty, and commits to strengthening military capabilities in intelligence, early warning, communications, positioning, space surveillance, and active defense.  Germany’s first National Space Security Strategy, released in 2025, commits up to 35 billion euros until 2030 and also recognizes the significant role of private sector innovation for space and the utilization of space technology.  Beyond Europe’s economic powerhouses France and Germany, however, member-state activity remains limited. Italy is the most important exception: its €1.07 billion IRIDE Earth-observation constellation, funded through the post-COVID aid national recovery plan (PNRR) and coordinated with ESA and ASI, is one of Europe’s largest current space programs and shows how national initiatives can still reinforce European capability.

The Orbit Is Becoming a Contested Space 

Orbit today can be compared to international waters with very few binding rules. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty established the principle of non-appropriation, but the framework is not comprehensive. It does not manage for example counterspace doctrine, debris management and anti-satellite testing. As the satellite count increases nearly exponentially from about 6,000 in 2022 toward 100,000 by 2030, the probability of incidents that cannot be cleanly attributed climbs. ESPI’s 2040 strategy outlook concludes: without binding rules of the road, low-Earth orbit will become functionally contested. While the recently announced EU Space Act will aim to reduce potential space debris and the environmental impact of the EU’s space activities, these issues are likely to persist.

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The Capital and Procurement Gap

SpaceX proves what private space companies can deliver, both in terms of efficiency and in terms of speed. SpaceX’s success, however, is also a result of very benevolent institutional conditions in the United States. SpaceX has raised over 10 billion dollars in private late-stage capital before becoming cash-flow positive, and the U.S. government has carried SpaceX across that late-stage “financing valley” through two specific procurement vehicles: NASA Commercial Resupply Services from 2008 and Commercial Crew from 2014. Both programmes were milestone-based, fixed-price contracts that paid for demonstrated capability rather than reimbursing cost. This created efficiency-focused incentives and drove innovation. Without that efficiency-focus, SpaceX would likely not have been able to secure further late-stage venture financing.

Europe lacks both sides of this equation. Despite a recent rise in European space venture funding, EU funding still runs at roughly one-eighth of U.S. levels in absolute terms. Late-stage tickets of 200 million to 1 billion euros, which a launcher or large-constellation business requires to reach a minimum scale, are extremely difficult to assemble on the continent.

On the procurement side, ESA continues to operate primarily under cost-plus and geographic-return rules. ESA's Boost! initiative for commercial space transportation services is a step toward milestone-based commercial procurement but remains modest in scale and lacks the multi-year guaranteed demand that anchored Falcon 9. The result is predictable: Europe has a credible NewSpace cohort, including Isar Aerospace, The Exploration Company, Rocket Factory Augsburg, MaiaSpace, PLD Space, and ICEYE, but no institutional path that reliably carries those companies from Series B to operational maturity at European ownership and IPO-readiness. Without that path, the most likely outcomes are acquisition by U.S. or Asian buyers, relocation of headquarters, or commercial failure before product-market fit, as seen in the case of the failed German eVTOL industry with companies like Volocopter and Lilium. 

Overall, the potential benefits of closing the US-EU gap are substantial. Economic upside sits in the trillion-dollar bracket, with quality-of-life gains in disaster response, agriculture, climate monitoring, and connectivity, plus a defense capability that does not depend on single public and private US individuals. However, for a real shift a significant financial burden would need to be overcome. Closing the gap requires heavy and sustained investment in a field with very high entry barriers. The right answer is to invest with civilian framing, frontier ambition, and norms leadership built in from the start.

The Urgency: The Gap Is Widening 

The urgency comes from the gap between Europe’s actual progress and what the United States (and to a certain extent also China and Russia) are accomplishing on a different scale and tempo. This gap widens even though the upstream space production is one of the few strategic growth markets that matches Europe’s existing industrial strengths. Launchers, satellites, ground systems, robotics, sensors, propulsion, and secure communications all are based on capabilities that Europe already has in advanced manufacturing, aerospace, defense, electronics, and high-precision engineering. As automotive manufacturing employment comes under increasing structural pressure, accelerating space market growth offers a high-value industrial transition path, especially for Germany, France, and Italy. While space tech will not replace the car industry, it offers a pathway to redeploy parts of Europe’s engineering base into a sector where demand is growing, strategic autonomy matters, and public procurement can create scale.

Rocket Launch Cadence at a Historic Low

In 2024, the US launched 145 orbital missions versus only three orbital missions by Europe (Figure 5). This one-year snapshot illustrates an ongoing trend of an ever-growing gap. At the mid-point of the previous decade, Europe was successfully launching roughly six to eight rockets per year via Ariane 5, whereas at the time the United States had not yet developed reusable launch vehicles (today the Falcon 9), and therefore was not outpacing European cadence by more than a factor of two. Since then, a steady decline occurred over the next ten years with the gap increasing rapidly since 2018, because of three reasons: First, the lack of availability of Soyuz (which had been available as a backup vehicle for European access to space since the early 2000s) caused an immediate disruption beginning in late February 2022. Second, the retirement of Ariane 5 prior to the introduction of its replacement, Ariane 6, resulted in Europe being without a functional means to send payloads to orbit for nearly three years. Third, SpaceX transformed Falcon 9 into a reusable launch vehicle capable of performing a successful mission approximately every three days. Thus, the European launch capacity remains below the level required to compete. 

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Frontier Innovation Research Unmatched

DARPA is currently funding work on space elevators, large bio-mechanical space structures, and other frontier capabilities that go well beyond procuring existing satellites. These programs place bets on entirely new ways of using orbit, with the value capture sitting in the United States. SPRIN-D has explicitly called for the freedom to fund military and dual-use projects, and the BMVg strategy identifies DLR’s institutional research base as a foundation that should be expanded. RAND’s Space Enterprise Initiative reaches a similar diagnosis from the U.S. side: frontier orbital capability has become an institutional question, with the hardware as a downstream output. 

Strategic Dependencies Increasing

Three dependencies have drastically hardened since 2022. First, Soyuz launcher cooperation collapsed after February 2022 and will not come back. That collapse stripped Europe of a launch option that had functioned for two decades as a load balancer for European missions, and several ESA payloads were postponed or cancelled as a result. 

Second, Ariane 6, the successor of the discontinued Ariane 5, is operational but not price competitive, so that the European Commission is preparing a “European preference rule”, as former Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton signaled in 2024. Pushing European firms to choose the costlier rocket is a defensible short-term measure but does not substitute for (cost) innovation and might establish another burden for EU companies.

The third dependency runs to the United States, both in terms of volatile public-public and public-private relationships. Starlink operates more than half of all active satellites, and a single decision by its operator on the use of the system to control drones in Ukraine had immediate battlefield consequences. Elon Musk has frequently taken an anti-Europe stance in public, and cannot be treated as a reliable partner for the EU. Public-public dependencies are similarly problematic: The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy ranks Europe below other regional partners and treats allied sovereignty as negotiable. Trump’s “American Dominance” in space has become an active strategy, undermining any potential role Europe could play. ECFR’s analysis of “defending Europe with less America” directly addresses the need for a wider US-independent security architecture.

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The Question for the Commission

US space dominance is a result of proactive industrial policies and market interventions that created the environment for innovation drivers like SpaceX to thrive. Europe has the engineering base and, for the first time, the financing envelope to recreate what the US successfully did. How can the European Commission, working with its member states, assemble those same conditions by 2035, so that a European launcher and constellation business can reach independent access to orbit and a commercial position of its own, without severing the partnerships that still serve European interests?

II. What Has Already Been Done, and Why it Is Still Not Enough

Military and Institutional Action

Germany has built more institutional space-defense capacity in the last three years than in the previous thirty. Germany’s 2025 National Space Security Strategy commits up to 35 billion euros. The Bundeswehr Space Command in Uedem runs a satellite operations and control center and processes roughly 75,000 close-approach analyses per year for German military satellites. The Bundeswehr also sets up a Space Academy, a Space Wargaming Center, and the European Space Component Command. In 2024, Germany and France joined the Operation Olympic Defender, a U.S.-led space defense coalition. In November 2025, France inaugurated its new Space Command (Commandement de l'Espace) facilities in Toulouse, through co-locating nine military space units alongside CNES and the NATO Space Centre of Excellence. At the EU level, the European Defence Fund’s space window is growing, the European Council endorsed the Readiness 2030 white paper in March 2025, and the SAFE 150-billion-euro defense loan instrument gave member states co-financing capacity.

Civilian and EU-Level Capability

EUSPA manages a portfolio of programs that anchor Europe’s civilian autonomy. IRIS² and the EU Government Satellite Communications program are the most recent and most strategically important. Galileo is technically more accurate than the U.S. Global Positioning System for civilian users. Copernicus is the largest civilian Earth observation program in the world. The Joint Communication on the EU Space Strategy for Security and Defence of March 2023 set the strategic frame, and SIPRI’s analysis at the time identified the next implementation steps now under negotiation. Several Galileo satellites have been lifted to orbit by SpaceX rather than by European launchers, an arrangement that itself shows the dependency at issue. The 2025 EU Space Act, now in legislative process, introduces supply-chain and cyber-resilience obligations that would apply, for the first time, to all operators offering space services in the Union market.

Private Sector Evolution

The European space industry is no longer dominated only by primes such as Airbus Defence and Space and OHB. Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg are credible launcher startups. The Exploration Company and ICEYE represent the European NewSpace expansion. PLD Space in Spain, alongside a wider continental cluster of firms, adds depth. DLR runs a Startup Factory. The BDI NewSpace initiative connects industry to government. OroraTech in Munich detects single-tree forest fires from orbit and alerts local fire brigades within minutes. SuperVision Earth in Darmstadt, Germany monitors pipelines using EU satellite data and AI. Despite being starkly behind U.S. levels, European space venture investment has significantly grown in recent years and is, with $1.3 billion (+20% YoY) in venture financing, significant both in absolute and relative terms.  France's Tibi initiative, launched in 2020 and renewed in 2023, which has mobilized roughly 30 billion euros of institutional capital from insurers and pension funds into French and European venture and growth funds, addresses the general late-stage funding gap effectively. 

Why This Is Still Not Enough

Each of these initiatives shows genuine progress. None of them, on their own or together, however, are significant enough to nearly close the U.S.-European structural gap. IRIS² delivery is slipping. Ariane 6, after years of delay, finally flew its first commercial mission in March 2025, five years behind schedule, and still manages only a single-digit annual launch cadence, far below the demand of European institutional payloads, let alone military ones. Norway’s Andøya Spaceport, intended as Europe’s first dedicated commercial orbital launch site, began testing only in March 2025. The ESA geographic return principle, by which member-state contributions are rebated as industrial contracts in the same country, has historically reinforced fragmentation. It distributes scarce engineering capacity across redundant national programs. 2025 NewSpace funding in Europe is roughly one-eighth of U.S. levels. The Belfer Critical and Emerging Technology Index ranks Europe particularly far behind in space, and CSIS’s Europe Corner analysis of structural dependency reaches the same diagnosis from the U.S. side. Europe lacks a DARPA equivalent, a procurement vehicle for high-risk frontier technology, and a standards body for orbital interoperability. The Draghi report also  names structural reform, strategic investment, and independent launch capability, as the missing basis for a sovereign European space sector. European investment is real and significant, but it stays fragmented across member state programs, moves slowly, is still small compared to US public and private investment, and remains exposed to political volatility across the Atlantic. 

III. Lessons from Recent Conflicts and the Commercial Frontier

From Ukraine

Since February 2022, the war in Ukraine has produced the largest live demonstration of space-enabled warfare in history, and the most concrete European data set on the practical direct and indirect costs of dependency. Two episodes stand out. On the morning of February 24, 2022, before the first strikes took place, a Russian cyber operation against the Viasat KA-SAT ground network disabled satellite communications used by Ukrainian command and a number of European civilian users, which could not recover access for weeks. Seven months later, the operator of Starlink publicly restricted service in Ukraine and produced a level of sovereignty anxiety in European capitals that two decades of academic warnings about commercial dependencies had failed to generate.

Commercial earth observation imagery from firms such as ICEYE, Maxar, and Planet gave Ukrainian forces real-time visibility of Russian dispositions, while Starlink terminals provided constant connectivity that legacy military networks could not deliver. RAND’s Space Enterprise Initiative concludes because of these learnings that the line between commercial and military use cases has blurred even further, and the operator of a capability becomes more important as it is this firm or person that ultimately decides when and how it is delivered. Examples like the 2026 Anthropic / Department of Defense confrontation over Claude usage for surveillance and autonomous weaponry show that even the U.S. government is not immune to this new reality of commercial decision makers’ dominance in security, let alone Europe.  

From Russia’s Gray-Zone Behavior

Russian conduct over the last five years confirms what the Belfer Center’s February 2026 assessment of threats to NATO’s eastern flank documents in detail: orbital interference is now part of Moscow’s standing gray-zone toolkit. Persistent jamming and spoofing of Galileo and GPS signals over the Baltic and the Black Sea, suspected close-proximity operations against Western reconnaissance satellites, and Moscow’s announced work on a nuclear anti-satellite capability together indicate that the threshold for orbital escalation has dropped. The Bundeswehr Space Command in Uedem alone records weekly interference attempts against European systems. Europe’s defensive posture in space, doctrinally and in attribution capacity, is not yet calibrated to that reality.

From the Commercial Frontier

In 1974, Airbus held roughly three percent of the global civil aviation market and Boeing held more than seventy. Fifty years later, the two are at parity. This was a European accomplishment which required long-term public investment, anchor demand from European airlines, financing through the European Investment Bank, and procurement rules that gave a young industry room to scale. The same logic applies to space today. Bruegel’s industrial-policy work on the European space sector concludes that Europe’s binding constraint is institutional. The engineering talent exists. The financing instruments, procurement rules, and pooled demand needed to turn that talent into market position do not yet exist at the scale required.

The European Parliamentary Research Service’s 2050 scenarios assessment concludes: in every long-run scenario short of decisive industrial-policy action, Europe ends up as a follower in space. Politico’s reporting on the European launcher debate, and Le Monde’s coverage of Andøya and the geographic-return principle, both show how procurement fragmentation has so far prevented even well-funded national programs from reaching minimum efficient scale. 

Overall, these lessons show that space capability is an industrial-policy problem as much as a defense problem, and instruments used for civil aviation, semiconductors, and electric mobility (anchor demand, joint procurement, and frontier research funding) are instruments to be applied for orbit.

IV. Five Recommendations

The five recommendations below are sequenced in order. Recommendations 1 and 2 build the financing capacity Europe lacks by 2028, Recommendation 3 establishes the political and cultural conditions for these reforms to survive their first failures by 2029; Recommendation 4 surfaces the dependencies and addresses the robustness needed by 2029. Finally, by 2030, Recommendation 5 considers the common market DNA of integrating standards and frameworks.

1. A European Vehicle for Deeptech Space Research 

Europe lacks an institutional vehicle for high-risk, mission-driven deeptech space research similar to U.S. equivalents like Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), and NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. ESA operates primarily under cost-plus and geographic-return rules, which by design select against frontier risk and for established industrial incumbents. The European Innovation Council Pathfinder funds early-stage research in all sectors but is not equipped with sufficient capital for the capital-intensive investments that frontier space technology requires. The result is that DARPA funds work on entirely new ways of using orbit (such as space elevators), while Europe has no equivalent answer. The Draghi report names this gap as one of the missing pillars of a credible European space strategy.

The Commission should support the founding of “Space-RIN-EU” by 2028. The operating model should follow Germany's Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SPRIN-D), the only European agency that has implemented the DARPA logic in practice, with program-manager autonomy, hard kill criteria, milestone-based contracts, and a dual-use mandate. Governance should follow the Airbus precedent: an intergovernmental consortium founded by the major European space powers Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, with a strategic council of member states, the Commission as co-financing partner, and pooled financing of one billion euros annually over a ten-year horizon, drawn from national contributions and the Multiannual Financial Framework.

Operational footprint should be distributed to mirror Airbus's principle of national industrial anchoring without geographic-return rigidity. A credible distribution locates the headquarters in Toulouse alongside CNES and the NATO Space Centre of Excellence, with major program offices in Munich and an Italian site. Program priorities should include especially reusable launches, in-orbit assembly, satellite-imagery, quantum-secured communications, and debris removal. A civilian-application portfolio should be included alongside any defense-relevant work, to preserve the dual-use logic that distinguishes this European space policy from others.

2. A European Late-Stage Space Investment Fund and Innovation-Friendly Procurement

Scaling a launcher or constellation business requires an interdependent combination of credible anchor demand and substantial growth capital. The Commission and the European Investment Bank should establish a 5 billion euro Late-Stage Space Investment Fund modeled on the NATO Innovation Fund, the first multi-sovereign deeptech fund of its kind, founded in 2022 with 24 member-state backers. The Fund should target Series C and later rounds in European NewSpace and dual-use orbital deeptech, with check sizes of 100 to 500 million euros, operating at arm's length from political institutions with a private-sector investment committee and market-rate return targets. SpaceX’s IPO reached a valuation of almost two trillion; a European fund of this kind keeps the upside of the next equivalent in European hands.

Alongside the capital instrument, the Commission and ESA should establish a procurement framework modeled on NASA Commercial Resupply Services and Commercial Crew, with milestone-based fixed-price contracts, multi-year demand commitments, IP retained by the contractor for parallel commercial use, and qualification timelines compressed to start-up reality. ESA's Boost! initiative provides a starting template but needs to be enlarged by an order of magnitude. Procurement modes are important because they not only define survival but also business model incentives of NewSpace launch companies: cost-plus rewards cost growth, while milestone-based fixed-price forces efficiency and creates the contractually anchored cash flows that growth-stage investors can underwrite.

The two components are interdependent. Capital without anchor demand produces overvalued companies that miss product-market fit; anchor demand without capital produces companies that win contracts but cannot finance the build-out. Implementing both is what gives credible European NewSpace firms – Isar Aerospace, Rocket Factory Augsburg, MaiaSpace, PLD Space, The Exploration Company, ICEYE – a path to operational maturity at European ownership.

3. A Culture Shift Towards More Civilian-Focus and Failure-Acceptance 

European space culture has two main issues. First, it is too risk averse (not accounting for the necessary failures of NewSpace ventures). SpaceX's institutional advantage was not only the procurement model or venture financing but also a culture of acceptance that frontier space programs fail before they succeed: Falcon 1 failed three times before reaching orbit; Starship has had multiple losses in flight test, each treated as data gains. Europe's reflex is the opposite. When Isar Aerospace's Spectrum was lost roughly 30 seconds after its first liftoff in March 2025, parts of the European political and media reaction treated the failure as evidence that European NewSpace cannot compete, rather than as the expected cost of frontier engineering.

To institutionalize a different reflex, milestone-based contracts under the new Venture Procurement framework (Recommendation 2) should explicitly fund a defined number of test failures as planned milestones, not as breach events. 

The Commission should also publish a Frontier Space Programs Communication Protocol that specifies how Member-State governments and EU institutions communicate test failures, drawing on NASA's standard practice of treating losses as engineering data collection. 

Additionally, drawing on NASA TV / NASA+, the Commission should partner with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to turn European launches into continent-wide media events, with live feeds, briefings, and contextual materials (including the meaning of potential failures) in all official languages distributed through the Eurovision network, online live feeds, and Member-State public broadcasters.

The second main issue with European space culture is that it is too defense-focused (not highlighting important civilian use cases like ICEYE’s flood-monitoring services). Public support for sustained European space investment is materially stronger when the civilian dimension – climate monitoring, wildfire detection, agricultural yield modeling, search and rescue, broadband for underserved regions, disaster response – is visible alongside defense use.

The Commission should therefore fund a €50 million EU space education package over the current MFF period, front-loaded for module development and translation into all official languages in the first two years, with a smaller annual budget for updates afterward. Modules would be produced with ESA and adapted by Member States for their own science and civics standards, with Erasmus+ co-funding for states that take them up, by 2028. Copernicus data behind wildfire alerts and flood maps fit into geographical education and shows how orbit reaches daily life; the Spectrum flight, lost 30 seconds after liftoff yet rich in flight data, fits physics as a worked example of iteration under real constraints.

The Commission should require that every program funded under SAFE, the European Defence Fund, or the next Multiannual Financial Framework define and report against a measurable civilian-application portfolio, with concrete outcome metrics. By 2029, an annual European Space Civilian Outcomes report, modeled on the EU Climate Action Progress Report, should aggregate these metrics across Member States and feed back into future funding decisions. KPIs measured could include: the share of EU-funded programs with a defined civilian portfolio and their downstream volumes (hectares under wildfire watch, flood alerts issued, population covered by satellite broadband); a Eurobarometer item on public awareness; the count of test failures funded as planned milestones; and adoption of the ESA teaching modules with the share of secondary students reached.

4. Annual Joint Robustness Tests

The European Commission and the European Defence Agency should jointly publish, every twelve months, a classified and an unclassified version of a robustness test that maps the dependencies of European civilian and military capabilities on non-European space services. The exercise should answer, in numerical detail: how many Member-State military communications channels currently route through commercial U.S. constellations; what share of Galileo and Copernicus traffic could be denied by known Russian electronic-warfare capabilities; what European industrial capacity exists to replace each dependency within twenty-four months; and what the resulting financing gap is. The unclassified summary should be a public document. The CSIS Europe Corner work on strategic ambition versus structural dependency, and the ECFR analysis of defending Europe with less America, both find that public scrutiny has historically been the main mechanism that produced European industrial coordination at speed. 

5. Cross-Border Interoperability Standards

Fragmentation is now the largest single source of inefficiency in European space procurement. Every Member-State constellation that ships with a proprietary command interface, encryption stack, or ground-segment design adds duplicative cost and slows the rate at which crisis capabilities can be combined. The EU should adopt an interoperability standards package, modeled on NATO requirements but enforceable under EU law. This should cover satellite platform interfaces, in-orbit refueling and servicing standards, and encryption. EUSPA, in coordination with the European Defence Agency and ESA, should run a European Space Domain catalogue. Member States should be required to contribute national space-surveillance data, with the catalog drawing on the close-approach work already performed by the Bundeswehr Space Command in Uedem and analogous national centers, and federated with the NATO Space Centre. A standing public-attribution protocol should publish detected interference incidents on a regular cadence, with classified details retained but aggregate statistics public, so that low-cost harassment becomes politically costly.

The Politics of Implementation

In contrast to the US or China, where decisions can be made relatively centrally, von der Leyen needs to address key challenges arising from a multi-state legislative system like the EU. 

The most important challenge to be addressed will be “juste retour”, the principle that individual member state contributions are roughly met by returns in the respective contributor states. Recommendations 1 and 2 break with this principle: Milestone-based procurement and a late-stage fund award money on performance and competitiveness; not on country of origin. Smaller countries may consider the recommended initiatives as transfers to the space hubs Toulouse and Munich, which effectively – to a certain extent – would also be true.  The EU Commission should address this by deliberately including member states that benefit less from funding opportunities in decisions over program offices, test infrastructure, and qualification facilities. Early access to the interoperability standards under Recommendation 5 gives smaller-country suppliers a defined role in every future European constellation. While it will not fully solve the juste retour problem, it offers the Commission a valuable currency for the 2028 Multiannual Financial Framework negotiation, which would be the right place to forward a proposal. 

A second challenge is of institutional nature: ESA answers to its own member states, three of which (Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) are not part of the union, and any move of procurement authority toward the Commission opens a dispute about competence. This is the reason Space-RIN-EU (recommendation 1) is institutionally designed as an intergovernmental consortium rather than an EU agency. The Commission joins as co-financing partner, which secures Union leverage without triggering the treaty questions that a new agency would. Recommendation 2 follows the same logic through the EIB: the NATO Innovation Fund showed that a multi-sovereign fund can be assembled by coalition, with member states joining on their own schedule rather than by common decision.

The third source of resistance is member states with neutrality regimes and/or strongly anchored militarization opposition in their respective populations. Austria, Ireland, and Malta are likely to resist any initiative that reads as militarization through the EU budget. Civilian and dual-use requirements, as established in Recommendations 1 and 3, are important levers to address these concerns. Civilian application reporting as suggested in Recommendation 3 increases awareness about the civilian value proposition of space technology in the respective member state populations. Where civilian application use cases are still insufficient, the SAFE instrument already allows member states to separate defense co-financing from the general budget, so a neutral member state can abstain from the defense window without vetoing whole initiatives. 

None of this removes the risk that a first launch failure or a cost overrun collapses the coalition. That makes a deliberate communication strategy as outlined in Recommendation 3 essential. Airbus faced the same coalition problem at its founding, with the same skeptics and the same incumbents, and succeeded because the founding governments engineered the politics as carefully as the aircraft. 

V. Conclusion

The European Union is investing in space at a scale that did not exist three years ago. Readiness 2030 and the SAFE instrument provide crucial financing. IRIS² and Galileo showcase the institutional groundwork that exists and European technology - yet on smaller scale - can become an operational success. A young EU NewSpace sector from Munich, Augsburg, Elche, and Toulouse provides the technical base for further innovation and cost efficiency. What is missing is the political decision to combine anchor demand, frontier procurement, interoperable standards, and a credible civilian narrative into a single industrial strategy. 

Civilian and defense uses of space rest on the same infrastructure. The same orbital infrastructure that supports NATO intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance also lets OroraTech detect a single fire in a Bavarian forest and SuperVision Earth monitor a pipeline in Hessen. The political coalition for sustained European space investment depends on making that connection visible across defense procurement, Commission communication, and Member-State budget debate.

The five recommendations in this brief can be acted on within forty-eight months. Institutional and financing capacity come first, with Space-RIN-EU and a Late-Stage Space Investment Fund paired with venture-friendly procurement. The cultural shift comes next, reframing space as a civilian public-good mission and institutionalizing a European failure culture, so that the first reforms survive their first necessary setbacks. Capabilities follow, with annual robustness tests, and binding interoperability standards. The whole package is built on the financing instruments that are already in place or imminent. 

The cost of inaction is easily foreseeable. By 2030, Europe will be more dependent on a single American company for satellite communications than at any earlier point in the post-1945 order to another state or multi-state alliance, Russian and Chinese counter-space capabilities will be more developed, the orbital commons will be more congested, and the European share of the projected 1.8-trillion-dollar space economy will be smaller than it is today, missing out on a huge economic opportunity. The European Parliamentary Research Service’s 2050 scenarios reach the same conclusion from a different angle: in every plausible long-run path short of decisive action now, Europe ends up as a follower in space.

With just three percent market share, 1974 Airbus had no obvious path to succeed against the incumbent Boeing. Airbus only succeeded because Europe institutionally engineered the outcome through patient public investment, anchor demand, rules that gave a young industry room to grow, and a shared European cooperative mentality. The same collective effort and institutional engineering, applied to space within President von der Leyen’s current mandate and within Commissioner Kubilius’s first generation of operational deliverables, is capable of creating the conditions for Europe’s own SpaceX equivalent.

1. ^

    SPRIN-D (2025) 'Position SPRIN-D-Mil'. Available at: https://www.sprind.org/worte/magazin/position-sprind-mil (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

2. ^

   Tagesschau (2025) 'Raumfahrt: ESA, NASA und Ariane im Jahresrückblick', 27 December. Available at: https://www.tagesschau.de/wissen/technologie/raumfahrt-weltraum-esa-nasa-ariane-jahresrueckblick-100.html (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

3. ^

   Traut, M. (2025) 'Der Weltraum war noch nie friedlich'. Available at: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/bundeswehr-bereitet-sich-auf-krieg-im-weltraum-vor-wir-haben-geld-aber-keine-zeit-a-e820db05-fe05-4f81-b02d-f2db59e5cae9 (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

4. ^

    EU member countries with relevant space spending: France, Germany and Italy

5. ^

   Statista (2025) 'Government expenditure on space programmes by leading countries, 2024'. Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/745717/global-governmental-spending-on-space-programs-leading-countries/ (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

6. ^

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7. ^

   Bundesministerium der Verteidigung (2025) 'Nationale Weltraumsicherheitsstrategie'. Available at: https://www.bmvg.de/de/aktuelles/erste-weltraumsicherheitsstrategie-der-bundesregierung-6042422 (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

8. ^

   European Space Agency (2024) 'IRIDE's PNRR Funding'. Available at: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/IRIDE/IRIDE_s_PNRR_Funding (Accessed: 6 July 2026). 

9. ^

   European Space Agency (2025) 'Around 100,000 satellites are expected to be in orbit by 2030', April. Available at: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/04/Around_100_000_satellites_are_expected_to_be_in_orbit_by_2030 (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

10. ^

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11. ^

    SpaceNews (2025) “U.S. Investors Dominate Europe's Private-Led Space Scale-Up Rounds”. Available at: https://spacenews.com/u-s-investors-dominate-europes-private-led-space-scale-up-rounds/ (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

12. ^

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13. ^

    European Centre for International Political Economy (2026) "Europe's Space Strategy for the 21st Century", Policy Brief, April. Available at: https://ecipe.org/publications/europes-space-strategy-for-21st-century/ (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

14. ^

    DARPA (2025) 'Novel Tech for Space Structures'. Available at: https://www.darpa.mil/news/2025/novel-tech-space-structures (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

15. ^

    SPRIN-D (2025) 'Position SPRIN-D-Mil'. Available at: https://www.sprind.org/worte/magazin/position-sprind-mil (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

16. ^

    RAND Corporation (no date) 'Space Enterprise Initiative'. Available at: https://www.rand.org/nsrd/space-enterprise-initiative.html (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

17. ^

    Center for Strategic and International Studies (2025) "Strategic Ambition vs. Structural Dependency: Why Europe Can't Stand Alone in Space". Available at: https://www.csis.org/blogs/europe-corner/strategic-ambition-vs-structural-dependency-why-europe-cant-stand-alone-space (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

18. ^

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19. ^

    The White House (2018) 'Remarks by President Trump at a Meeting of the National Space Council and Signing of Space Policy Directive-3', 18 June. Available at: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-meeting-national-space-council-signing-space-policy-directive-3/ (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

20. ^

    European Council on Foreign Relations (2024) 'Defending Europe with less America'. Available at: https://ecfr.eu/publication/defending-europe-with-less-america/ (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

21. ^

    Bundesministerium der Verteidigung (2025) 'Nationale Weltraumsicherheitsstrategie'. Available at: https://www.bmvg.de/de/aktuelles/erste-weltraumsicherheitsstrategie-der-bundesregierung-6042422 (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

22. ^

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23. ^

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24. ^

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25. ^

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26. ^

    EUSPA (no date) 'IRIS² (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite)'. Available at: https://www.euspa.europa.eu/eu-space-programme/secure-satcom/iris2 (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

27. ^

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28. ^

    European Commission (2025) 'Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the safety, resilience and sustainability of space activities in the Union', 25 June. Available at: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:52025PC0335 (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

29. ^

    Munich Aerospace (2025) 'Sector report', November. Available at: https://www.munich-aerospace.de (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

30. ^

    Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (no date) 'NewSpace Initiative'. Available at: https://bdi.eu/de/specials/newspace-initiative (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

31. ^

    OroraTech (no date) 'Munich-based wildfire detection startup'. Available at: https://ororatech.com (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

32. ^

    SuperVision Earth (no date) 'Darmstadt-based satellite pipeline-monitoring company'. Available at: https://supervision.earth (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

33. ^

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34. ^

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35. ^

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36. ^

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37. ^

    Draghi, M. (2024) 'The future of European competitiveness', Report to the European Commission, September. Available at: https://commission.europa.eu/topics/eu-competitiveness/draghi-report_en (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

38. ^

    Center for Strategic and International Studies (2025) "Strategic Ambition vs. Structural Dependency: Why Europe Can't Stand Alone in Space". Available at: https://www.csis.org/blogs/europe-corner/strategic-ambition-vs-structural-dependency-why-europe-cant-stand-alone-space (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

39. ^

    Center for Strategic and International Studies (2025), ‘Strategic Ambition vs. Structural Dependency: Why Europe Can't Stand Alone in Space’. Available at: https://www.csis.org/blogs/europe-corner/strategic-ambition-vs-structural-dependency-why-europe-cant-stand-alone-space (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

40. ^

    RAND Corporation (no date) 'Space Enterprise Initiative'. Available at: https://www.rand.org/nsrd/space-enterprise-initiative.html (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

41. ^

     Currently reffered to as Department of War (DoW)

42. ^

    Belfer Center (2026) "Russian Threats to NATO's Eastern Flank", February. Available at: https://www.belfercenter.org (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

43. ^

    Der Spiegel (2026) 'Bundeswehr bereitet sich auf Krieg im Weltraum vor', 6 April. Available at: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/bundeswehr-bereitet-sich-auf-krieg-im-weltraum-vor-wir-haben-geld-aber-keine-zeit-a-e820db05-fe05-4f81-b02d-f2db59e5cae9 (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

44. ^

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45. ^

    Bruegel (2025) 'Satellites and space races: the role of Europe in the space economy'. Available at: https://www.bruegel.org/podcast/satellites-and-space-races-role-europe-space-economy (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

46. ^

    European Parliamentary Research Service (2025) 'Space 2050: Scenarios for the European Union'. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2025/765792/EPRS_IDA(2025)765792_EN.pdf (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

47. ^

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48. ^

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49. ^

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50. ^

    DARPA (2025) 'Novel Tech for Space Structures'. Available at: https://www.darpa.mil/news/2025/novel-tech-space-structures (Accessed: 6 July 2026). 

51. ^

    Draghi, M. (2024) 'The future of European competitiveness', Report to the European Commission, September. Available at: https://commission.europa.eu/topics/eu-competitiveness/draghi-report_en (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

52. ^

     The suggested name builds on the German SPRIN-D template. “RIN” stands for “Consortium for Radical Innovation” translating consistently as radikale Innovation (GER), innovation radicale (FR), innovación radical (SPA), and innovazione radicale (ITA), and lends itself to a shared “space rhino” brand identity and mascot.

53. ^

    SPRIN-D (2025) 'Position SPRIN-D-Mil'. Available at: https://www.sprind.org/worte/magazin/position-sprind-mil (Accessed: 6 July 2026). 

54. ^

    European Space Agency Commercialisation (2026) 'Boost! — Commercial Space Transportation Services Element'. Available at: https://commercialisation.esa.int/opportunities/boost-1-commercial-space-transportation-services-element/ (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

55. ^

     On the Isar Aerospace Spectrum test flight of March 30, 2025, the vehicle was lost approximately 30 seconds after liftoff from Andøya. Both the company and ESA classified the test as a successful first attempt that delivered substantial flight data.

56. ^

    Center for Strategic and International Studies (2025) "Strategic Ambition vs. Structural Dependency: Why Europe Can't Stand Alone in Space". Available at: https://www.csis.org/blogs/europe-corner/strategic-ambition-vs-structural-dependency-why-europe-cant-stand-alone-space (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

57. ^

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58. ^

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59. ^

    Der Spiegel (2026) 'Bundeswehr bereitet sich auf Krieg im Weltraum vor', 6 April. Available at: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/bundeswehr-bereitet-sich-auf-krieg-im-weltraum-vor-wir-haben-geld-aber-keine-zeit-a-e820db05-fe05-4f81-b02d-f2db59e5cae9 (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

60. ^

    European Council (2025) 'Readiness 2030 / SAFE proposal'. Available at: https://www.consilium.europa.eu (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

61. ^

    McKinsey & Company (2024) 'Space: The 1.8 Trillion-Dollar Opportunity'. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/aerospace-and-defense/our-insights/ (Accessed: 6 July 2026).

62. ^

    European Parliamentary Research Service (2025) 'Space 2050: Scenarios for the European Union'. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2025/765792/EPRS_IDA(2025)765792_EN.pdf (Accessed: 6 July 2026).