French President Emmanuel Macron was in combative mood when he addressed aerospace executives and innovators in Toulouse.
“We have fought for months saying European sovereignty is European unity. Unfortunately, some of our partners have decided to become competitors,” he told the December gathering in France’s aerospace capital. “So take note, we’re going to push very hard to be the best.”
With those words, Macron launched the race to find Europe’s future rocket-maker of choice, capable of propelling the biggest and most sensitive missions into space. As the sector finally opens up to competition, there are signs that 50 years of European collaboration on accessing space may be fragmenting.
“Everyone has lost sight of the final objective, which is a European programme,” warned Pierre Lionnet, director of research at trade body Eurospace.
For decades, France’s ArianeGroup and its predecessor companies have been the prime contractors for jointly funded development of Europe’s Ariane family of heavy launchers. Until 2017, Ariane dominated the global market for commercial launches into geostationary orbit — 36,000km above Earth.
However, delays in delivering Ariane 6, problems with the smaller Vega-C produced by Italy’s Avio and the breakdown of collaboration on Russia’s Soyuz medium-lift rocket have left Europe without its own launch capability. Instead the bloc has had to turn to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, even for sensitive missions.
Josef Aschbacher, director-general of the European Space Agency, has described the lack of launch capability as a “crisis” for Europe’s sovereign access to space.
Aschbacher has long argued for a model on the lines of US space agency Nasa, under which Europe would not procure rocket systems but instead buy flight services from European commercial launch companies.
Last November his wish was granted. ESA member states decided to launch a competition for the next generation of rockets, initially for an intermediate launcher and then for a successor to Ariane 6. ArianeGroup, owned by France’s Airbus and Safran, will no longer be the guaranteed prime contractor.
The demand for competition came from Germany, home to some of Europe’s most promising rocket start-ups. It was the price France had to pay for German backing on a €1bn European support package for Ariane 6. Without the subsidy, the expendable Ariane 6 would struggle to compete with SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9.
“Ariane 6 should have been able to compete on the commercial market without any subsidy,” said Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s acting director of space transportation. “It did not deliver and now member states want us to change the system.”
As the deal on competition was struck, Italy’s Avio withdrew its small Vega launcher from Arianespace, the subsidiary of ArianeGroup that markets and manages all of Europe’s launches.
Avio objected to ArianeGroup’s plan to target Vega’s market with MaiaSpace, its small rocket start-up.
“How can we have a sales and marketing organisation that is building a competing product?” said Avio’s chief executive Giulio Ranzo. “If Ariane is going to be a competitor, you don’t want it to have information on your rocket.”
Officials from the ESA — which is independent of the EU but acts as its procurement agency, and includes non-EU countries such as the UK and Switzerland — said the aim was not to replace incumbents such as ArianeGroup or Avio, but to spur them to be more efficient.
“We wanted to give them an electroshock. We have done that. We have completely changed the paradigm of access to space,” said Tolker-Nielsen.
But individual ESA member states, like many countries, all want their own slice of the expanding space economy, forecast by Morgan Stanley to be worth $1tn by 2040. Launch capability is key: Europe has close to 20 start-ups developing micro-launchers and most have plans for larger rockets.
“We have to avoid this becoming a competition between nations,” said Tolker-Nielsen. “It is not going to be easy.”
Competition means ESA will also have to review the principle of georeturn, in which member states are allocated contracts proportional to their investment in a rocket programme. Critics say this results in a non-competitive supply chain, favouring the biggest rather then the most efficient investors.
But abolishing the system was risky, said Lionnet. “With georeturn, programme managers know what their budget is and who the suppliers are,” he said. It would also be difficult for governments, which “would not know if they had to invest €20mn or €100mn”, he added.
However, Aschbacher hopes freeing launch providers to choose their own suppliers while delivering fair returns to member states will both lower mission costs and stimulate Europe’s commercial space sector.
Nasa contracts not only fuelled the rise of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, but its reusable rockets dramatically lowered launch costs, creating a vibrant US space industry.
“We looked into the US model and the lessons learned,” ESA’s director-general told the FT. “We will give industry the freedom to do it the best possible way from their point of view”.
Not everyone is convinced, however. Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator at Nasa, said the space agency’s strategic turn could be difficult to replicate. “We had a unique situation with the richest person in the world, where our strategy was aligned with what he wanted to do anyway,” she said.
European rockets will have to compete not just with SpaceX’s Falcon 9, but with its giant Starship, which is expected to lift payloads of up to 150 tonnes into orbit when it finally becomes operational.
Most importantly, Europe could struggle to guarantee enough recurring demand to help bring down costs. The requirements of its projects, such as the Galileo navigation service, the planned IRIS² broadband constellation or scientific missions, are tiny in comparison with the US. “We don’t have a large volume of demand for launcher systems as the Americans do,” said Lionnet.
Space consultancy Euroconsult estimates European governments’ annual spending on space in 2022 — either through national programmes or ESA — was less than a third that of the US.
To succeed, member states would have to agree to pool their institutional launch needs to feed these European competitors, even if others might be cheaper. ESA tried to do this for years but had “not succeeded”, said Tolker-Nielsen.
Europe’s rocket start-ups welcome the competition, but some insist firmer signals are needed to convince investors. “ESA needs to act like real anchor clients,” said Ezequiel Sánchez, executive president at Spanish rocket company PLD Space, arguing that ESA should pursue a “full launch contract for missions”.
But pooling demand may be pointless if national interests prevail.
“Instead of trying to find a common solution which is best for everyone . . . some see this as an opportunity to build more on their own side,” said Eurospace’s Lionnet. “But there is no good national solution for European sovereignty in launch. Interdependency must be the rule.”
