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Congrats! How come European companies still haven't managed to match SpaceX's capabilities? Europe has an incredible talent pool, especially in aerospace, and s

by num42 27d ago

Congrats! How come European companies still haven't managed to match SpaceX's capabilities? Europe has an incredible talent pool, especially in aerospace, and some of the world’s best expertise in precision engineering, instrumentation, sensors, avionics, and other hard-tech subsystems. A huge amount of the expertise and supply chain for these components is concentrated in Europe. So what are we missing? Is it mainly systems integration, manufacturing scale, risk tolerance, organizational structure, or the willingness to iterate as aggressively as SpaceX? It feels like Europe has many of the pieces needed to build world-class launch systems, but hasn't yet put them together at the same scale and speed.

consumer451 27d ago
Probably the biggest thing is that capital in the EU is far more conservative.
- generuso 27d ago
  Incidentally, the early investment for Isar came from Bülent Altan, the Turkish ex-SpaceX guy who was in charge of the guidance system for Falcon-1, Falcon-9 and Dragon.
  - consumer451 27d ago
    Very interesting, thanks. It looks like he was an angel investor in Isar, and then co-founded a VC firm that continued to invest in Isar: https://alpinespace.vc/ https://alpinespace.vc/
logifail 27d ago
> So what are we missing? There are some (many?) European companies which are considered as least as much as a jobs program as anything else. In 2018, Alain Charmeau (in)famously expressed frustration with SpaceX in an interview with Der Spiegel and rejected reusability with these words: “Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year,” he said. “That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: ‘Goodbye, see you next year!’” https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-frustrated-with-spacex-for-driving-down-launch-costs/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f... from the original https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-die-amerikaner-wollen-europa-aus-dem-weltraum-kicken-a-1207322.html https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-d... A more recent example would be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project which was officially cancelled in June 2026, due to (?) industrial rivalry and leadership disputes, with a side order of politics.
- bdauvergne 27d ago
  That's the only good answer of the thread. ArianeGroup is mainly the SLBM program of France and after that a way to maintain european know-how in rocket building and for nearly 20 years was the main space launch company in the world before Space-X. All those companies success and failures (be that Space-X or ArianeGroup) are linked to their political environment and how much money can be spent on their launch market. Space-X could use the technique of launching many and fail as much because they had the contracts to do it and years of tangential R&D by Nasa. The ecosystem explains everything and the relative intelligence of american or european engineers nearly nothing.
  - NetMageSCW 26d ago
    SpaceX launched three times and would have failed if their fourth launch hadn’t worked. They certainly never had the money to launch many times and fail.
- skybrian 27d ago
  Perhaps this “jobs program” could be seen as preserving industrial capacity? With military contractors, for example, it’s apparently a problem when they’re used to build a stockpile and then they shut down because there are no more orders.
generuso 27d ago
Most of the US space launch startups have failed. And in Europe it is harder to even try. There was a confluence of several factors which helped SpaceX to succeed, and not the least of these was the employee number one. For many years, Tom Mueller has been working in his free time on rather large liquid fuel amateur rockets, which he was building in his garage and which he was launching from some amateur rocketry facilities in the desert. In terms of regulation it was a relatively accessible hobby in the US. At the time Musk found him, he was working on the original "BFR" -- a very large liquid fuel amateur rocket. So the deal was to invest serious money into the project and scale the same no nonsense approach to a small orbital launch vehicle. They were in LA, the center of US aerospace manufacturing, so through Tom's professional connections and knowledge of who was who in the industry, they were able to source the necessary materials, components, and to find the key personnel for their company. Significantly, NASA has already spent probably a decade or more trying to get somebody to produce a cheap small launch vehicle. This did not directly affect SpaceX, but it did fund the R&D for example at Barber-Nichols, which enabled them to offer a turbopump for SpaceX engine at a much lower cost than it would have been possible otherwise. At first, Musk and Co thought that they would be able to develop the rocket for a few million dollars. But even in the US regulatory environment it turned out that doing everything in compliance with regulations raised the costs to well over a hundred million dollars. So, Tom's hobby + Musk's activism + industrial ecosystem in the area + NASA's prior support of component vendors + being at the right time to snag the International Space Station delivery contract were all important for SpaceX thriving where so many others have failed.

by num42 27d ago

consumer451 27d ago

Probably the biggest thing is that capital in the EU is far more conservative.

generuso 27d ago
Incidentally, the early investment for Isar came from Bülent Altan, the Turkish ex-SpaceX guy who was in charge of the guidance system for Falcon-1, Falcon-9 and Dragon.
- consumer451 27d ago
  Very interesting, thanks. It looks like he was an angel investor in Isar, and then co-founded a VC firm that continued to invest in Isar: https://alpinespace.vc/ https://alpinespace.vc/

logifail 27d ago

> So what are we missing? There are some (many?) European companies which are considered as least as much as a jobs program as anything else. In 2018, Alain Charmeau (in)famously expressed frustration with SpaceX in an interview with Der Spiegel and rejected reusability with these words: “Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year,” he said. “That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: ‘Goodbye, see you next year!’” https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-frustrated-with-spacex-for-driving-down-launch-costs/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f... from the original https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-die-amerikaner-wollen-europa-aus-dem-weltraum-kicken-a-1207322.html https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-d... A more recent example would be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project which was officially cancelled in June 2026, due to (?) industrial rivalry and leadership disputes, with a side order of politics.

bdauvergne 27d ago
That's the only good answer of the thread. ArianeGroup is mainly the SLBM program of France and after that a way to maintain european know-how in rocket building and for nearly 20 years was the main space launch company in the world before Space-X. All those companies success and failures (be that Space-X or ArianeGroup) are linked to their political environment and how much money can be spent on their launch market. Space-X could use the technique of launching many and fail as much because they had the contracts to do it and years of tangential R&D by Nasa. The ecosystem explains everything and the relative intelligence of american or european engineers nearly nothing.
- NetMageSCW 26d ago
  SpaceX launched three times and would have failed if their fourth launch hadn’t worked. They certainly never had the money to launch many times and fail.
skybrian 27d ago
Perhaps this “jobs program” could be seen as preserving industrial capacity? With military contractors, for example, it’s apparently a problem when they’re used to build a stockpile and then they shut down because there are no more orders.

generuso 27d ago

Most of the US space launch startups have failed. And in Europe it is harder to even try. There was a confluence of several factors which helped SpaceX to succeed, and not the least of these was the employee number one. For many years, Tom Mueller has been working in his free time on rather large liquid fuel amateur rockets, which he was building in his garage and which he was launching from some amateur rocketry facilities in the desert. In terms of regulation it was a relatively accessible hobby in the US. At the time Musk found him, he was working on the original "BFR" -- a very large liquid fuel amateur rocket. So the deal was to invest serious money into the project and scale the same no nonsense approach to a small orbital launch vehicle. They were in LA, the center of US aerospace manufacturing, so through Tom's professional connections and knowledge of who was who in the industry, they were able to source the necessary materials, components, and to find the key personnel for their company. Significantly, NASA has already spent probably a decade or more trying to get somebody to produce a cheap small launch vehicle. This did not directly affect SpaceX, but it did fund the R&D for example at Barber-Nichols, which enabled them to offer a turbopump for SpaceX engine at a much lower cost than it would have been possible otherwise. At first, Musk and Co thought that they would be able to develop the rocket for a few million dollars. But even in the US regulatory environment it turned out that doing everything in compliance with regulations raised the costs to well over a hundred million dollars. So, Tom's hobby + Musk's activism + industrial ecosystem in the area + NASA's prior support of component vendors + being at the right time to snag the International Space Station delivery contract were all important for SpaceX thriving where so many others have failed.