For the second week in a row, Paris is presenting itself as the center of the space industry.
Europe’s premier space business conference opened Monday, following a government-sponsored gathering last week where European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen touted the continent’s potential, corporate executives announced deals and French President Emmanuel Macron chatted with a French astronaut on the International Space Station.
Missing from Macron’s summit were some prominent US companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. The French government took a thinly veiled snipe at President Donald Trump by drawing a direct line between their absence and what it called “rumors of pressure” from his administration to sit out the event.
The perceived snub is one sign of a strained trans-Atlantic relationship since Trump returned to the White House. Europe’s leaders are calling for more autonomy in space, companies are building alternatives to SpaceX and aerospace and defense players like Airbus SE and Thales SA are pooling resources.
Europe’s strategic moves potentially herald a restructuring of the global space order, upending decades of lock-step collaboration between the US and its allies. By tipping the balance of power abroad, the changes may be difficult if not impossible to unwind after Trump leaves office.
NASA has been a tool of soft power for the US since the Cold War, but is now at risk of becoming more isolated on the global stage. While the US remains the dominant space player, ESA’s distancing moves open the door to Washington missing out on collaborative efforts abroad.
Playing a pivotal role in the drive for space autonomy is European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher.
The Austrian is walking a fine line after Jared Isaacman, the billionaire former fintech executive who runs NASA, in March canceled Gateway, a multinational lunar satellite project for which ESA was developing key modules. Isaacman’s announcement heightened a sense of vulnerability to priority shifts within the agency.
“Europe is too exposed in its cooperation, especially in exploration, to the United States,” Aschbacher said in an interview.
In addition to NASA’s scrapping of Gateway, the US cancellation of an ESA-backed Mars sample-return mission “showed very visibly and very clearly that Europe needs to reconsider and reposition itself in exploration,” he said.
NASA engaged with its Gateway partners, including ESA, ahead of the Gateway announcement and acted after considering the project’s cost and schedule challenges, Isaacman said in an emailed statement. He added that the US is cooperating with European partners on other lunar plans.
“Going forward, we will prioritize arrangements that accelerate outcomes, reduce unnecessary cost and complexity, and help achieve our exploration goals faster,” Isaacman said. “NASA welcomes stronger capabilities among our allies.”
SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment. A Blue Origin representative had no immediate comment.
Aschbacher wants to ramp up rocket launches, deploy more satellites and push governments to prioritize space exploration.
ESA is looking at increasing the number of missions of its Ariane 6 and Vega-C rockets and flying its own crewed missions rather than buying slots from SpaceX, Aschbacher told reporters on Sept. 2.
ESA last month awarded more than €540 million in contracts to three startups to develop Europe’s first reusable rockets. One of the winners, Germany’s Isar Aerospace, on Sept. 5 launched from a Norwegian spaceport, becoming the first company to send a rocket to orbit from Europe.
More established companies are doing their part to distance themselves from the US.
Project Bromo, a proposed merger among Italian aerospace company Leonardo SpA and Airbus and Thales to unify regional space operations, will likely receive regulatory approval by the end of next year, Leonardo Chief Executive Officer Lorenzo Mariani told Bloomberg in June.
To build support for his program, Aschbacher is looking to member nations that historically haven’t had major space programs.
In July, he showed up in Warsaw to announce a new security center, the agency’s first in Eastern Europe.
“If we are truly serious about European sovereignty, Europe cannot lag behind the United States, and especially China, when it comes to space exploration capabilities,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.
ESA is also seeking deals with counterparts from Canada and Japan also hit by NASA’s Gateway cancellation.
And Aschbacher in January hosted the administrator of the China National Space Administration, the first meeting with China’s top space official in nearly a decade. ESA and CNSA are cooperating on a joint mission launched in May.
The Austrian’s agenda will face a test in December at a meeting of agency member nations in Italy where he’ll ask them to approve a plan to define a space exploration roadmap.
ESA is set to play a critical role in European Union plans for a satellite network called IRIS designed to offer an alternative to SpaceX’s Starlink. ESA is injecting €550 million in that plan, which has a total budget exceeding €15.6 billion and is scheduled to launch on European rockets from 2029.
The campaign to make Europe less reliant on NASA faces many obstacles. While Aschbacher has talked about Europe having its own crewed missions, the agency has no official target date.
Member states contributed a record €22.1 billion ($25.5 billion) to fund ESA’s space programs over the next three years, a 36% increase, but far less than NASA’s annual budget of $24.4 billion. Regulatory hurdles and complex funding structures mean that European space projects take a long time to get over the line.
Competing political interests among ESA’s member nations are also an ever-present hurdle.
“Coordinating an industrial base that’s spread across multiple geographies within Europe, it’s been a challenge,” said John Walsh, strategy consultant at Novaspace. “It’s very different from, for example, NASA or China, which are able to call upon the resources of the entire country relatively efficiently.”
After more than five decades of collaboration, ESA isn’t planning to sever all ties with NASA. Europe still relies on SpaceX to ferry satellites and astronauts into orbit. It also wants to continue to build a moon base with the US.
ESA provides the European Service Module for Artemis, an ESA astronaut will fly on Artemis III, and all 23 ESA member states have signed the Artemis Accords, Isaacman said in his statement.
NASA’s strongest international partnerships are built on shared missions, meaningful contributions and agreements that deliver fair value for NASA and the United States, Isaacman said.
“It’s great news for the United States to have Europe as a strong partner,” said Hélène Huby, chief executive officer of The Exploration Company, which this month announced it raised $450 million to boost the development of Europe’s first reusable space capsule and a new rocket engine.
Still, the Gateway setback was a reminder of the need for a rethink, said Lars Petzold, European Space Policy Institute Lead on Exploration and Science.
“We are going to move from a relationship that was more like a senior-junior partner in the past to something where Europe acts more autonomously,” he said.
Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Bloomberg news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.