Europe's bid for its own launches starts from 12 percent of last year's space investment

Twelve percent of $13.5 billion is $1.62 billion. Sixty-eight percent is $9.18 billion. European space companies took in roughly $7.6 billion less than US ones out of last year's global investment in the sector, a ratio of about 5.7 to one ^[6][7]. The figure tracks money going into companies. State budgets sit outside it, and the largest new European number is a state one: Germany plans to spend 35 billion euros by 2030 on spy satellites, space planes and other military equipment ^[19].

Nature gives that plan as around $40 billion, close to 25 times what European space companies raised privately across last year ^[19][21].

The dependency Europe is trying to shed also works item by item. NASA said last week that it will no longer supply an instrument for Envision, a European Space Agency mission to Venus set to launch in 2031 ^[12]. The Nature report does not name a replacement ^[22].

On crews, the hardware lags the speeches. "Europe must fly with its own crews," Macron said at the summit ^[9]. The nearest hardware in the story is Nyx, a spacecraft from The Exploration Company in Gauting, Germany, which announced $450 million in funding on 8 September, one of the largest raises in European space history, to carry cargo and eventually humans ^[20].

The summit itself supplied the political prompt. The White House was reported by Politico and others to have discouraged US companies including SpaceX and Blue Origin from attending ^[8]. Eva Berneke, previously chief executive of the French satellite company Eutelsat, told Nature that the last-minute cancellation by "the big Americans" was a "wake-up call" ^[10]. "Europe needs to step up," she said ^[11].

Bleddyn Bowen, an astropolitics researcher at Durham University, does not expect Europe's launch industry to match those of the United States or China, and sets the test instead as whether Europe "has enough essential infrastructure in space" with its own rockets ^[16]. That matters for buyers. Enough launch capacity for Europe's own satellites is a different thing from a commercial alternative to SpaceX, whose Starlink network is now the leading provider of internet from space ^[5].

The EU's answer on connectivity is IRIS2, 348 satellites due to begin launching in 2029, serving civilians, businesses, emergency services and the military ^[17]. "IRIS2 has been talked about for many, many years," Bowen said. "Now, things are actually getting built" ^[18].

Launch is where the change shows most. It is also the least mature. Ariane and Vega fly from French Guiana, and Europe has no private rocket sector on the scale of those in the United States or China ^[13]. On 5 September the German company Isar Aerospace flew the first orbital rocket to take off from European soil, from the Andoya spaceport in Norway ^[14]. Several European firms are working on reusable rockets and heavy-lift launchers ^[15].