This is just another of many examples of Europe's decline in global relevance. It's what happens when your chief innovation is regulation.
I don't know if it's regulation, or a combination of the other business factors HN brings up in the discussions about European startups. But the symptoms are alarming. Forget the graphs of past launches—look towards the future: check up how many newspace startups are being founded in each region, and how many are in the reusable launcher race.
The EU has zero. (Isar isn't working towards reusable rockets). There are, as far as I find, fat-0 European startups working on it.
USA has, by my subjective count, five—SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Labs, Relativity Space, and Stoke Space. That's just the big ones.
China has—I'm too lazy to count right now, there are seriously too many search results. Deep Blue and Landspace seem to be the most talked-about ones (at least in the West). And—not only are they in serious competition to replicate Starlink, they have two groups in a race competing on that (Guowang, and Thousand Sails).
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-own-elon-musks-are-ra...
The 27 countries of the EU put together have 0.
What the heck is failing in the EU?
What you shoot up is much more important than how you shoot it up.
We shot up the most powerful space telescope, capturing a third of the entire sky in never seen before detail [0].
We're also currently busy deploying our starlink alternative that works via regular 5G instead of specialized terminals. [1]
Being the cheapest Space Truckers isn't of much interest to us. We're more interested in making sure the stuff we put up there is cool.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/19/scientists-h...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/eutelsat-succeeds-w...
EU is definitely behind. It's at least an entire generation (perhaps 1.5) behind.
ESA does have grants for funding reusable rocket development (ArianeGroup and Isar both got funding for that). Uhh... who knows how successful those programs will be.
To be fair to both Isar and RFA (which are both much more in the 2010s New Space mold), the equivalent rockets (Falcon 1, Electron, etc) weren't reusable either. EU firms are playing catch up, I think its fair that they take some amount of incremental steps through.
As people have generally noted, the market for stuff that Isar and RFA are building (1-2 ton to LEO) is actually really small. I think both companies are banking on building expertise and confidence and then trying to iterate relatively quickly to something Falcon 9 class with re-use.
The American competitors like Relativity and Stoke get to bootstrap off of all the work that SpaceX (especially) and Blue Origin (less so) have done to give a more credible path to immediate re-use.
Alright. But even if I concede that (that Americans startups are benefiting unfairly from SpaceX), at least two Chinese startups are on schedule for booster-recovery launches this year,
https://spacenews.com/deep-blue-aerospace-raises-new-funds-t...
https://spacenews.com/landspace-launches-third-methane-zhuqu...
In the case of Deep Blue, they're attempting recovery on their very first orbital launch (they're been hover-testing that booster up to 1 km already). Newspace startups don't have the luxury of competing against 2006-era Falcon 1; they're competing against 2025-era startups like Deep Blue—a dozen very aggressive competitors, all speedrunning towards the same goal. I don't feel the EU is even in the running.
In the case of Landspace, it's their 6th launch attempt (I think). This launch is competing against SpaceX and Blue Origin both, for the first recovered-booster, orbital methane launch. It's possible they might come in first—that's how rapidly certain technological gaps have narrowed.
(They already got the crown for the first orbital methane launch—Zhuque-2 in 2024. Meaning the first in history. No one in the West has heard of the word "Zhuque". That worries me. They beat even SpaceX to this milestone—our media ecosystem is completely sleeping on remarkably capable competition).
The Chinese ecosystem is very impressive. They both have tremendous cash and resources flowing into their government owned agencies, and specific funding and competition in their private new space companies. I understand there's tremendous talent and knowledge transfer sloshing around the Chinese ecosystem, say nothing about funding and resources.
But let's be real - EU new space is not competing against the Chinese launch market right now. There's time and room for them to mature.
One major reason why EU capabilities are lagging is because they hitched their geopolitical wagon to the US and assumed that the US launch providers would be sufficient for commercial purposes, and that ESA/Arianespace only had to preserve enough capability to meet truly strategic requirements.
Now the EU is scrambling because they realized that there are unsavoury downsides. Just deciding to cede all European launches to the Chinese is literally just putting themselves in the same shit soup.
And even practically, the EU-USA decoupling is going to take time. And until the EU gets enough strategic autonomy in space, I think the EU is largely going to play nice with the US rules against collaborating with China in space (that means almost no EU payloads are going to be launched by China).
> One major reason why EU capabilities are lagging is because they hitched their geopolitical wagon to the US and assumed that the US launch providers would be sufficient for commercial purposes, and that ESA/Arianespace only had to preserve enough capability to meet truly strategic requirements.
This is just not true.
Ariane Group was a market leader in space launch when SpaceX started launching rockets, and Ariane 6 was designed specifically to help Ariane Group maintain commercial competitiveness with Falcon 9. They just did a bad job of it[1].
The story line of Ariane 5/6 only being there to preserve independent access to space only appeared on the scene after SpaceX conclusively trounced them in the market.
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1. The reasons why this happened are complicated by some of them are:
* For a long time Ariane Group leadership maintained a belief that SpaceX was selling F9 launches below cost and that the USG was subsidizing them with higher cost government launches.
* Ariane Group publicly claimed that reuse was not economically feasible and that that capability in F9 didn't matter.
* Ariane Group has long maintained (and continues to do so) a policy of "economic return" where countries get contracts for subcomponents in rough proportion to the amount of money they contribute to the program. This necessitates a "big design up front" approach, and makes iteration very slow and difficult.
* SpaceX was able to improve Falcon 9's performance far more than anyone probably expected through aggressive iteration, more than doubling its payload to LEO over its lifetime. This was, in large part, due to the Merlin 1D engine doubling the thrust of the Merlin 1C. For context, over 30 years, the Space Shuttle's RS-25 engines increased in thrust by only ~10%.
- "They both have tremendous cash and resources flowing into their government owned agencies, and specific funding and competition in their private new space companies."
Yeah, this gets to the heart of what I raised at the root comment: "What's failing in the EU?" Why aren't there torrents of cash and resources, talent and knowledge, flowing into European tech startups?
> that Americans startups are benefiting unfairly from SpaceX
Why is that unfair?
> Deep Blue, they're attempting recovery on their very first orbital launch
This shouldn't be a surprise. One would want to test as much as possible in each expensive launch. If the recovery failed, it would not impact(!) any other tests, so it is a very sensible idea to add it to the early tests.
- "Why is that unfair?"
Poor phrasing by me. "It's to be expected that European newspace will move slower than American startups, because their industry environment and institutional knowledge is poorer (than Americans')".
Isar is working towards reusability, albeit not as a priority. Even Arianespace has reusability in its roadmap. The UK alone has three small launch startups with reusability in their roadmap, from Skyrora (first stage with parachute only) to the more speculative Space Engine Systems spaceplane. The economics of reusability favour large rockets with regular launch cadences though, and that takes a lot of capital, which is why European newspace companies tend to focus on components, satellites and tugs...