As Arianespace wrapped up the webcast of the March 6 launch of the CSO-3 French reconnaissance satellite on an Ariane 6 rocket, the broadcast aired a recorded message from Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research.
“Bravo, Arianespace! Bravo, ArianeGroup!” he said.
While his ministerial portfolio does not include military space, Baptiste previously was president of the French space agency CNES and a key figure in the final efforts to get the Ariane 6 flying.
His remarks were typical celebratory remarks and he thanked others involved in the launch.
Soon, though, his comments took a sharp turn.
“We are facing a new global reality in the space sector,” he declared. “The return of Donald Trump to the White House, with Elon Musk at his side, already has significant consequences.”
Those consequences include an uncertain future of cooperation with NASA and NOAA, and Musk having “unilaterally questioned” operating the International Space Station through the end of the decade.
“If we want to maintain our independence, ensure our security and preserve our sovereignty, we must equip ourselves with the means for strategic autonomy, and space is an essential component of this,” he said. “Ariane 6 is the guiding thread of our strategic autonomy.”
Baptiste’s comments were perhaps the sharpest public commentary yet on the changing geopolitical landscape in space since the start of the Trump administration just a few months earlier. As the new administration strains longstanding ties with allies on topics such as defense and space, Europe is making a new push to ensure it need not rely as much on the United States or its rockets in the future.
The opportunity for institutional growth
This geopolitical shift comes just as Europe emerges from what Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, called a “launcher crisis” that temporarily deprived Europe of independent access to space. The first launch of Ariane 6 in July 2024 followed by the return to flight of the Vega C in December, marked the end of that era.
Now European launch providers say they see a new impetus from their governments to boost launch rates.
“Our challenge is to ramp up successfully as quick as possible,” said David Cavaillolès, chief executive of Arianespace, during a panel at the 2025 Satellite conference March 10.
Cavaillolès joined Arianespace in January after the departure of the launch service provider’s longtime leader, Stéphane Israël. While Cavaillolès came to Arianespace from consulting company Capgemini, he previously worked in the French government, including as ministerial adviser for space.
“Autonomous access to space is one of our missions for decades, so this is not new,” he said. But he added that the importance of such autonomous access is only now being understood. “What is new is that, in the past sometimes, it sounded a bit theoretical and so on. And now, I think, people really understand what it means to have sovereign domestic capabilities to deliver end-to-end missions.”
Arianespace’s immediate focus is on ramping up the Ariane 6 flight rate. The company has four more Ariane 6 launches planned for 2025, all in the second half of the year. He said the goal is to reach the planned flight rate of nine to 10 launches each year as soon as possible to meet the needs of its largest commercial customer, Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation and a planned 3,236 satellites.
However, Cavaillolès said he expected to see more demand from European government customers. “Clearly, today we see that the market, especially the institutional market, is growing faster than the supply,” he said. “We see huge room for growth in this market.”
One of those sources of demand will be Europe’s IRIS² broadband constellation. Plans for IRIS², unveiled in December, call for using 13 Ariane 6 launches to deploy most of the constellation near the end of the decade.
Another source of demand may be European governments such as Germany and Italy, which have been more willing to launch with SpaceX. ESA and the European Commission turned to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket only in the depths of the launcher crisis, when there were no other vehicles available and missions could not be delayed.
The French government, heavily invested in launch, has been quietly critical of European allies who in the past have gone outside of Europe for launch, but Baptiste was more public in his criticism.
“We must not yield to the temptation of preferring SpaceX or another competitor that may seem trendier, more reliable or cheaper,” he said after the CSO-3 launch. “We must not yield because doing so would mean closing the door to space for good.”
France, he said, did the right thing with CSO-3, which was originally set to launch on a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana, losing its ride three years ago when Russia halted Soyuz launches there after its invasion of Ukraine. France waited until Ariane 6 was in service to launch CSO-3 rather than seek a ride on Falcon 9 or another vehicle. “We did not yield for CSO-3,” he said, “and we will not yield in the future.”
That increased demand could lead Arianespace to revisit the peak flight rate of Ariane 6. Last fall, Israël all but ruled out flying Ariane 6 more than 9 to 10 times a year, citing bottlenecks in the production of the solid rocket boosters used by the vehicle. “If we were to increase the cadence, we would have to invest a lot,” he said at a briefing during World Space Business Week last September. “We can only do it if there is a sustainable business case.
“We see that the market is growing. We see that it might grow even faster with all the changes in the world today,” Cavaillolès said of an increased Ariane 6 flight rate. “For sure it will require investment. I’m quite convinced that we can deliver a stronger return on investment.”
‘Europe lacks ambition’
Arianespace is no longer the only player in European launch. Avio, which produces the Vega C, has now taken over sales and marketing of the rocket from Arianespace and, by the end of the year, will assume overall launch responsibilities.
Several European startups are making progress on small launch vehicles as well. They include Isar Aerospace, whose first Spectrum rocket was scheduled to launch as soon as late March from Andøya Spaceport in Norway.
Those companies are also seeing the results of shifting geopolitics on their businesses.
“Due to the geopolitical situation in the world, with the U.S., we have to start running with our shoes on,” said Marino Fragnito, chief commercial officer and launch services director at Avio, during another Satellite 2025 panel.
“The geopolitical situation and the unpredictability of international relations will shift things” in the launch market, said Stella Guillen, chief commercial officer of Isar, on that same panel.
Those companies are hoping that their vehicles can recapture business from European companies that have turned to SpaceX, especially its Transporter and Bandwagon line of rideshare missions, used for launching smaller satellites. “Customers want to have a backup,” said Pablo Gallego, senior vice president at PLD Space, a Spanish launch startup.
But Fragnito argued that Europe was playing catchup in launch because of a lack of investment in the sector for years. “Europe lacks ambition. It’s lacked ambition for the last 20 to 30 years,” he said. Vega, he said, was originally designed to launch just one to two times a year, citing a lack of perceived demand.
ESA’s goal for strategic autonomy
On March 20, ESA released Strategy 2040, a document setting goals and objectives for the agency for the next 15 years.
One of the five goals is to “strengthen European autonomy and resilience,” with a particular emphasis on space transportation. “A first key pillar in this regard is having guaranteed autonomous and competitive access to and mobility in space, free from external dependencies,” the document states.
At a media briefing after a meeting of the ESA Council, where member states formally approved Strategy 2040, Aschbacher said the council meeting included a discussion on the “geopolitical aspects that are requiring Europe to be stronger and also more independent.”
In other words: a potentially volatile relationship with the U.S.
That discussion will feed into planning for ESA’s next ministerial conference in late November, where member states will approve and fund programs. He said the package of programs ESA will offer to member states at the ministerial is being adjusted based on geopolitics and requests from ESA’s members.
“They have asked us to look in detail on some of the elements where the existing package may need to be reinforced or may need to be readjusted in order to better respond to the current situation,” he said, “and see whether there are new elements that might need to be put on the table which have not been in the package before.”
He did not elaborate on those potential changes, but at the briefing he and other ESA officials emphasized the European Launcher Challenge, an effort to support development of new small launch vehicles. ESA is releasing a call for proposals in March for the competition, and will determine which proposals are then eligible for funding.
“Then we will have a bouquet of eligible companies,” said Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transportation. It will be up to member states, though, to determine which ones to fund in November.
Aschbacher said at the briefing that, despite changing geopolitics, ESA’s relationship with NASA remained strong, particularly on the Artemis lunar exploration campaign. He said he had yet to meet with Jared Isaacman, the Trump administration’s nominee for NASA administrator, but looked forward to doing so.
“I will reassure our American friends and partners that we have a strong, good cooperation which is to the benefit of both parties and, yes, Europe will continue to deliver as we have always done,” he said.
No blowback … yet
American launch companies have yet to report any impacts of these geopolitical shifts on their businesses.
“We’ve always been approached by many countries around the world for sovereign launch capabilities,” said Brian Rogers, vice president of global launch services at Rocket Lab, which operates the Electron rocket. That demand, he said on a Satellite 2025 panel, has not been slowed by recent concerns.
Similarly, Tory Bruno, chief executive and president of United Launch Alliance, said he has not had issues selling Vulcan launches because the vehicle has a substantial backlog from Project Kuiper and the Space Force’s National Security Space Launch contract. “It’s as many as we could build in this period of time,” he said at a briefing on the sidelines of Satellite 2025.
Fragnito, at another conference panel, was asked another version of the question: would there be a possibility of Avio winning U.S. government launch business? “We find it very difficult to access the DOD market in the U.S. being a non-U.S. launcher,” he said.
“It’s very complicated to work across borders, especially in the geopolitical situation today,” he concluded. “U.S. rockets for the U.S. and European rockets for Europe, which is not good.”
This article first appeared in the April 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine with the title “Europe’s ‘strategic autonomy’ means it needs space.“
