The global space business is booming. A study by Roland Berger and the Association of German Industry (BDI) forecasts that the overall market will grow from around €470bn in 2024 to €2trn by 2040, or around 9% a year. Next to America, however, Europe is a tiddler. The American government spends $77bn a year on space; European spending is around $10bn. SpaceX alone accounted for over half of all rocket launches worldwide in 2024.
Germany, Europe's biggest economy and long home to several space startups, presented its first space strategy in late 2025, promising to allocate €35bn to military space technology by 2030. France unveiled a new space strategy the same month. In October 2025, after years of deliberation, Airbus and Thales (both based in France) and Italy's Leonardo agreed to merge their space businesses. The model for the joint venture is MBDA, a missile-maker created in 2001 by Airbus, Leonardo and BAE Systems.
Of the 324 orbital launches worldwide in 2025, just eight were European, compared with 193 American, 93 Chinese and 17 Russian ones. Europe currently relies on the ESA's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, to launch satellites, but three spaceports are vying to offer launches directly from continental Europe: Andøya in Norway, Esrange in Sweden and SaxaVord in Scotland's Shetland Islands. High-latitude launches are more fuel-efficient for polar and sun-synchronous orbits.
The European Space Agency, based in Paris, has been the continent's main space body for 50 years. It is responsible for Copernicus, an Earth-observation programme, and Galileo, a satellite-navigation system more accurate than America's GPS. Europe is eager to reduce its dependence on Starlink, SpaceX's satellite-internet service, which has been vital to Ukraine's defence effort. The EU launched a €10.6bn initiative in December 2024 to develop iris², a rival satellite constellation, but it will have only 290 satellites against Starlink's 9,100 and will not be operational before 2030.
That must be wonderful: I don't understand it at all.