Representatives from 22 European countries reached an agreement Monday to change the way the continent's rockets are developed, moving from a government-driven approach to a commercial paradigm that appears to be modeled after how NASA and the US military do business.
This is a big moment for the European Space Agency and its member states, which have traditionally funded the lion's share of rocket development costs since the start of Europe's launcher programs more than half a century ago. Josef Aschbacher, a scientist who took over as director general of ESA in 2021, has argued that Europe is in an "acute launcher crisis" now that the continent lacks independent launch capability for most of its space missions.
Officials from ESA's 22 member states met Monday for a Space Summit in Seville, Spain, to decide on several priorities for the space agency. The rocket question was perhaps the most pressing among the topics up for discussion.
“I think it is fair to say today is a very successful day for space in Europe," Aschbacher said Monday. "I would almost call it historic because we have made decisions which will have long implications for the future.”
The agreement means the new Ariane 6 rocket, which is running four years late and still hasn't flown, should be the last launch vehicle developed by ESA. Europe's old way of developing rockets just isn't working anymore. The current model, Aschbacher said, has been in place for decades, producing new generations of Ariane rockets since 1979.
Now, rather than being a rocket developer, ESA will move to a "competition model, where we buy a service as an anchor customer," Aschbacher said.
"That is not to be undervalued or underestimated," he continued. "Of course, it takes time until these new launchers come and fly and provide heavy-lift launch capability, but we are building it up now, and today these decisions are made.”
Another notable outcome of Monday's meeting was the endorsement of a program to design and build a commercial cargo transportation vehicle capable of ferrying supplies to and from the International Space Station.
ESA will fly commercial
"All 22 member states of ESA have agreed that we have to change how we procure the launcher of the future, and this is a very new way of doing it," Aschbacher said. "ESA will launch a competition of launchers without weight class limitations."
Next year, ESA will open a competition to any European company working in the launch business. These companies can submit proposals to ESA through what the agency calls a "challenge" initiative. ESA will select several companies, perhaps up to three, for public funding that will come in the form of commercial service contracts, similar to how NASA works with contractors like SpaceX or United Launch Alliance in the launch arena.
ESA will create a list of payloads it will assign to launch on these commercial rockets. European government ministers did not decide Monday on new funding—it was a meeting to make policy decisions—so ESA will manage the initial stages of the launch competition using limited money already allocated to the agency, then present the winners to its member states at the next big conference in 2025, when European governments will be prepared to open their checkbooks.
"It will be one, two, or three, that we will develop in a competition," said Toni Tolker-Nielsen, acting director of space transportation at ESA. "Perhaps later it will funnel down to two. We shall see how it goes."
The field of startup launch companies in Europe includes German firms like HyImpulse, Rocket Factory Augsburg, and Isar Aerospace; British companies such as Skyrora and Orbex; and Spain's PLD Space, which recently test-launched its first suborbital test vehicle. ArianeGroup has its own small launch startup called MaiaSpace in France, and the Italian company has plans to evolve its already-flying Vega launch vehicle. All these companies, and others across Europe, would be eligible for ESA's new launch challenge.
“We will define our service needs, but it will be completely up to the provider to develop their launcher and fit that launcher to what they see best in terms of market," Tolker-Nielsen said. "There will not be limitations or any requirements, neither minimum nor maximum payload performance.”
For reference, Andrew Parsonson of European Spaceflight has a handy ranking of European launch companies.
"Some of these startups are working on micro-launchers today," Tolker-Nielsen said. "They might have different plans to develop their next launcher. They all have plans to grow. Some will go directly to a heavy or to a 5-ton (payload) launcher, some might choose to go to a 2-ton to low-Earth orbit launcher. As long as they respond to our service needs, there will not be any constraints on that."
European officials hope an influx of public support for Europe's launch startups will stimulate more private investment in European space technology.
"On the one side, public money is needed to start these kinds of competitions, but then, in a way, that attracts investors to put money in private companies that participate in these competitions to boost the budget for space that we have in Europe," said Anna Christmann, coordinator of aerospace policy for the German government.
In an interview with Ars, Tolker-Nielsen said the commercial launch competition was part of a bargain among ESA member states. In exchange for the shift to a more commercial strategy for rocket development, European governments agreed to more than double their subsidies to ArianeGroup, the prime contractor for the Ariane 6 rocket. ArianeGroup says it needs more public money to keep the Ariane 6 competitive on the international launch market, helping the new rocket serve the needs of big commercial customers like Amazon, which has booked 18 Ariane 6 launches to deploy satellites for the Kuiper broadband network.
Germany, home to some of the most promising commercial launch startups in Europe, was pushing for the new competitive framework. France, where about half of the Ariane 6 rocket is built, tilts in favor of keeping ArianeGroup on solid footing.
"The joint implementation of the European launcher challenge is a decisive step toward independent, reliable, and resilient and competitive European access to space," said Walther Pelzer, director general of the German Aerospace Center, known by the German acronym DLR.
Philippe Baptiste, president of France's space agency, CNES, said it is necessary to prop up Ariane 6. “Europe will not have a new heavy launch vehicle for a good 10 years to come," he said Monday. "In the meantime, Ariane 6 will be the only available solution, so let us make the most of this."
For now, it’s Ariane 6 or bust
The Ariane 6 rocket is more expensive than officials thought when they greenlit the program in 2014. The Ariane 6 will come closer than the recently retired Ariane 5 launcher to matching SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket on cost, but Europe runs the risk of falling even further behind as SpaceX brings its next-generation Starship rocket online.
Nevertheless, after nearly a decade of work, ESA, the European Union, and commercial customers—primarily Amazon—need the Ariane 6 soon to launch dozens of missions already on contract. It's a widely held view among many European officials that it is imperative to have a sovereign launch capability.
ArianeGroup, a 50–50 joint venture between Airbus and Safran, recently asked European governments to further subsidize the Ariane 6 program to keep the new rocket competitive internationally. The request was for 350 million euros per year in support payments to cover the start of production for 27 more Ariane 6 rockets that will fly in 2027, 2028, and 2029. Some of these rockets will presumably launch Amazon's Internet satellites. That's up from the 140 million euro annual subsidy in place since 2021.
This didn't sit well with many ESA member states, which have already committed billions of euros to the Ariane 6 program. Apart from the subsidies, Europe has committed to flying at least four missions per year on Ariane 6 rockets beginning in 2026, ensuring ArianeGroup and its subsidiary, the launch service provider Arianespace, a steady flow of business. But European officials were left with little choice but to boost the payments and keep Ariane 6 afloat until a new generation of rockets is ready.
European space officials regularly claim SpaceX receives large subsidies of its own from NASA and the Pentagon. While SpaceX holds lucrative service contracts and has received funding to help develop new rocket engines and the Dragon capsule for cargo and crew missions, the company's rockets come from private money. SpaceX also doesn't receive an annual support payment akin to the one ESA provides to ArianeGroup.
Europe's Ariane 5 rocket was highly successful, both technically and commercially, until its retirement earlier this year. But the Ariane 5's once-dominant position in the global launch market eroded toward the end of its career as SpaceX brought down launch prices with its partially reusable Falcon 9.
The Ariane 6, designed to be expendable on each flight like the Ariane 5, was supposed to be ready to take over in 2020 but now won't make its first test flight until next year. On top of that, Ariane 6 will miss ESA's goal of operating the new rocket for 50 percent less than the Ariane 5, which cost around 150 million euros per flight. One Ariane 6 flight is now projected to be around 40 percent below the cost of an Ariane 5, ESA officials said earlier this year.
At the same time, Europe has lost access to Russia's medium-lift Soyuz rocket following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the light-class Vega C rocket failed on its second launch last year. Engineers are redesigning part of the Vega C's second-stage rocket motor, a process that will delay its next launch until late 2024.
In another example of discord among Europe's spacefaring nations, Italy won a major concession from other ESA member states Monday, allowing Avio, the Italian company that builds the Vega rocket, to independently market launch services. This means Avio will sell Vega launches independently from Arianespace, the French company that has managed Vega sales since the rocket's inception.
This gives Avio, and Italy's broader space industry, a path forward in the launch sector outside the bounds of Europe's legacy rocket program. Tolker-Nielsen said Arianespace and Avio will have to discuss how to handle existing Vega launch contracts.
We spend, we build
Baptiste, who leads the French space agency, said last week in an interview with the French newspaper Les Echos that the intricacies of ESA's governance structure were to blame for Ariane 6's delays. ESA has overall responsibility for the Ariane 6 program, while the agency gave ArianeGroup control of the rocket's design. CNES managed construction of the Ariane 6's launch pad in French Guiana. For Ariane 6, CNES gave up the control of rocket design that it held for Ariane 1 through Ariane 5.
In the interview, Baptiste also pointed to ESA's policy of geographic return, which means European countries should receive industrial contracts commensurate with their expenditures on a program. For example, France, Italy, and Germany are the big financial backers of Ariane 6, so most of the work on that rocket is done in those countries.
Baptiste said the geographic return rule crippled ArianeGroup's ability to choose its suppliers and negotiate prices. This, he argued, slowed development and reduces competitiveness. “We waste time, and suppliers have little incentive to lower their prices.”
Tolker-Nielsen, a longtime ESA official, called the geographic return rule "fundamental" to how the space agency operates. He said an ESA analysis found that ending the geographic return policy on the Ariane 6 program would result in "negligible" cost savings. He foresees a twist to the geographic return rule for the upcoming commercial launch challenge.
"We will establish the winners of the competition before we ask for the funding, so we will ask for the funding according to the geographical return of each of the challengers," he said.
"This is one of the points we have to work on. I do not have yet the full solution," Aschbacher said.
Dreams of a homegrown crew vehicle
ESA's ambition for its own human spaceflight program also took a small step forward Monday. The agency's member states endorsed an ESA proposal to catalyze another competition among European space companies, similar to the one planned for launch services.
"We will buy a cargo return vehicle which should fly to the International Space Station by 2028, bring some tons of payload up to the space station, dock at the space station, and come back to Earth with some tons of cargo in the vehicle," Aschbacher said. "This requires transport, docking, and reentry capability, something Europe does not possess today."
That's just five years away, a timeline Aschbacher acknowledged is a "huge challenge." Even if Europe achieves that schedule, the new cargo transporter would be in service just two years before the projected retirement of the ISS.
But the cargo vehicle wouldn't have to be a dead end, Aschbacher said. It could evolve into a human-rated vehicle to ferry astronauts to and from space. ESA will use around 75 million euros in the agency's budget since 2022 to pay for the early stages of the cargo challenge, which Aschbacher expects will result in three companies competing with one another.
"Public funding for the initial phase has already been secured and will be complemented with private investments," he said. "We will select the winning bidder through a competition in which ESA will be the anchor customer.”
Like the launch challenge, the cargo competition will hinge on funding decisions at the next high-level meeting of ESA member states in 2025. It's unclear how much money ESA will request for these programs at that time, and turning a cargo vehicle into an astronaut transport would likely require billions more euros.
But there's no fault in dreaming big. Europe has been down this road before. In the 1980s, ESA approved the development of a reusable spaceplane called Hermes that would have launched into low-Earth orbit on top of the Ariane 5 rocket with a crew of three astronauts.
The Hermes program was canceled in 1992, following "numerous delays" and a determination that "neither cost nor performance goals could be achieved," according to ESA.
That was the closest Europe ever came to having its own human spaceflight program. Andreas Mogensen, an ESA astronaut from Denmark who commands the current crew on the International Space Station, lamented that decision in remarks Monday downlinked from orbit to the Space Summit in Spain.
"I can’t help but think of what position Europe would be in today if we had developed Hermes," Mogensen said. "We would have been able to launch astronauts to the International Space Station and to take over in 2011 after the space shuttle retired. So I’m wondering, 25 years from now, will we look back on today and say if only we had made the investments... that will enable European participation in space in the future."
