I recently met a European space startup founder and was surprised to learn how much space innovation is happening in Europe with ESA. Europe wants to become less depended on SpaceX and NASA, and is heavily investing there. More funding + strong aerospace programs at universities like TU Munich has led to companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor), which is great to see.

I work in the domain, and it is true that many of the startups will almost entirely use free data, like from the sentinel satellites via ESA. It really lowers the barriers to entry, if you have a nice idea.

EDIT:

We actually work close with one startup that sprung out from academia. The founders wrote their masters thesis on object detection and pattern recognition using sentinel imaging. They had basically one product: to detect certain objects. After a couple of years they had gotten a handful of customers (basically they'd receive coordinates to some are of interest, and then tasked with trying to detect something), which afforded them to purchase commercial data (from other types of sensors) for building more robust systems. This in turn grew their customer bas, and they started adding products.

Then they were acquired by one of the largest private space companies.

But, in any case, it all started with access to free data. Would they have started a company like this, if they hadn't had access to the data from ESA? Who knows, but it made it all much easier. And they were able to completely bootstrap the company.

If you are ever in Munich and want to find out more, be sure to visit the ESO Supernova[0].

[0] https://supernova.eso.org/

There are even Hackathons from ESA:

"Act in Space"

https://actinspace.org/

I worked at one of the hosts of one these events years ago - very intersting people there!

maiaspace (https://www.maia-space.com/) also intends to compete with SpaceX and is an Ariane spin-off, they're meant to do their first launch this year and start putting satellites in LEO in 27

At this point, calling ISAR a competitor to SpaceX feels a bit like calling Pringles a competitor to TSMC, but it's certainly good to see some movement happening.

For sure, it's booming in the current climate. My biggest bet for 2026 is Eutelsat which is the biggest star link competitor.

there's a pretty great blog following european space news

https://europeanspaceflight.com/

A lot has been happening in recent years with launchers once ESA broke the Ariane "chokehold".

Europe is behind in launchers, but the stuff they send up is top-notch.

Euclid, the latest ESA telescope is particularly mind-blowing, capturing a third of the visible sky in incredible detail.

Check out this update video, it's insane how they can zoom in on stuff: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rXCBFlIpvfQ

Can you show some actual evidence of that? Because evidence actually shows that commercial growth in the US outpaces Europe by a gigantic degree. The traditional European companies like Airbus has made lots of loses. European companies are not even competing in the LEO race to any serious degree.

Their 'compete with SpaceX' Ariane 6 rocket has been an unmitigated disaster. And in order to 'compete with SpaceX' they are giving billions in subsidies to Amazon instead, I guess that is better. And its exactly what they didn't want to do when they designed the Ariane 6 program in the first place.

> companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor)

If anything they are a far, far, far inferior competitor of RocketLab. SpaceX isn't even in the same universe as ISAR.

The simple fact is, small rocket companies are not viable, and pretty much all of them are not profitable and/or go bust. RocketLab itself basically never made money from rockets, the pivoted mostly to in-space stuff.

Maybe one of the small European rocket companies can survive if it gets enough support from ESA, but then moving on to anything beyond that is going to be hard.

> NASA, and is heavily investing there

If we look at ESA and EU space budget, we can see that it goes up a bit, but nowhere near close to anything in the US.

So yes, there is some energy in the European space sector, but its very easy to overestimate, and specially if you look at it compared to the US.

The Trump administration is probably helping quite a bit on two fronts here:

- A very strong political will to decouple strategic industries from the US

- The US is making it a lot harder to work there. So top talent stays in Europe.