In October 2025, three heavyweights of the European aerospace industry, Airbus Defence and Space, Thales Alenia Space, and Leonardo, announced plans to merge their space activities. The project, currently known under the codename “BROMO,” is still subject to approval by the European Commission. The announcement comes at a pivotal moment for the European space sector. Between the continuous loss of competitiveness over more than a decade in the face of international competition, the recent “launcher crisis” that deprived Europe of sovereign access to space, and the rapid expansion of low Earth orbit mega constellations driven by US and soon Chinese “New Space” champions, the European space industry is undergoing a crisis and must react to prevent its lag from becoming irreversible.
Although the project is widely regarded as necessary, it raises numerous doubts. Some welcome an initiative aimed at pooling European resources in the face of increasingly fierce international competition, while others criticize the slowness with which European actors have decided to act. While the project is sometimes presented as a response to the Starlink constellation, several observers point to a timeline that is completely misaligned with the urgency of the challenges at stake. The merger is not expected to be effective before 2027 at the earliest, and the European multi-orbit constellation IRIS² is not expected before 2030. But with tensions rising on Europe’s eastern flank and the ongoing restructuring of US security priorities, Europe may not have the luxury of a stretched timeline.
Europe’s Space Sector in Crisis
The European space model, which enabled the continent to rank among the scientific and commercial leaders of the space sector since the 1970s, is now weakened by profound geopolitical ruptures and by a reconfigured space economy that is more competitive than ever. From an industrial perspective, Europe’s share of the global manufacturing and launch market fell from approximately 20 percent in 2008 to just 6 percent in 2023, while the United States and China captured most of the upstream growth. This erosion of European competitiveness is directly linked to the rise of American New Space actors, particularly SpaceX, which today launches, builds, and operates more satellites than all other actors combined.
This competitiveness crisis is further exacerbated by a shift in the center of gravity of the satellite market. Geostationary satellites long dominated the market and formed the backbone of the European industrial economic model, with European manufacturers supplying major telecommunications operators. Today, this segment is in decline, under the combined effects of the downturn in satellite television and the rise of new non-geostationary orbital architectures, especially low Earth orbit mega constellations. In 2022, more than 6,700 satellites were operational, twice as many as in 2020. This expansion is largely powered by LEO constellations, which have become the main engine of the space economy’s growth. By September 2023, approximately 90 percent of the 8,496 active satellites were already operating in low Earth orbit, illustrating how decisively market dynamics have shifted toward the mega-constellation model, now dominated by Starlink.
To this competitiveness crisis is added a sovereignty crisis. The so-called “launcher crisis” between 2022 and 2024 exposed the vulnerability of Europe’s access to space. The retirement of Ariane 5, the failures of Vega and Vega C, and the abrupt end of cooperation with Russia on Soyuz left Europe virtually grounded, with only three launches in 2023, compared to 107 for the United States in the same year. Beyond this episode, the highly open and interdependent European model has revealed its limits. European institutions explicitly acknowledge the existence of critical dependencies along space value chains, particularly in electronic components, power technologies, and certain processing capabilities, to the extent that a dedicated program on “critical space technologies for European non-dependence” has been launched.
The United States, by contrast, benefits from a highly integrated industrial base covering the entire value chain, from reusable launchers to commercial constellations and downstream services, supported by a public space budget of approximately $73 billion, compared with $13 billion for Europe. Washington also retains significant structural leverage through its export control regimes, which regulate global access to key technologies.
The Ukraine war has further revealed this asymmetry, demonstrating the extent to which Europeans remain dependent on American space-based intelligence capabilities, particularly commercial constellations such as Starlink for secure communications. The crisis of European space is therefore both a competitiveness crisis and a strategic autonomy crisis, occurring at a time when space is becoming a central arena of economic and military rivalry and when there is a real risk that the gap with leading powers will turn into a lasting setback unless industrial and political responses change scale.
BROMO: Europe’s Industrial Response
The BROMO project emerges at a critical moment for the European space industry. The erosion of market shares held by European manufacturers in favor of New Space actors, combined with the shift of the global satellite market from geostationary platforms to low Earth orbit constellations, poses a major long-term economic and industrial risk. More significantly, the already wide gap between the space production capacities of major powers, foremost among them China and the United States, and those of Europe risks becoming insurmountable. This dynamic continues to create significant security and sovereignty risks at a time when Europe’s defense industrial and technological base is under growing pressure to scale up amid Russia’s war in Ukraine and mounting uncertainty over the pace and scope of US security commitments.
In this context, the merger of the Italian, French, and German space heavyweights is primarily conceived as a response to the competitiveness and sovereignty crisis of European space. From an economic standpoint, such an operation appears coherent. Pooling the capabilities of Airbus, Thales Alenia, and Leonardo would help reduce the widely criticized fragmentation of the European space sector, rationalize production, and share investments. In theory, creating a player of critical size would facilitate the achievement of economies of scale that are essential for the serial production of low Earth orbit satellite constellations, while strengthening the ability to offer more competitive integrated solutions in the face of large US groups. Moreover, a merger of this magnitude could mitigate competition among European manufacturers in already highly contested export markets and provide the new entity with greater bargaining power vis-à-vis European public authorities as well as major institutional and commercial clients.
A Necessary Yet Insufficient Initiative
The BROMO project is essential to address the crisis in the European space industry, bolstering competitiveness and sovereignty. But is it sufficient? By 2027, the gap may already be too deep.
Presented as a response to US and Chinese mega constellations, BROMO neither has the ambition nor the capacity to compete with Starlink in terms of volume. Deploying constellations of several thousand satellites corresponds neither to European resources nor to European needs. The immense scale of Starlink is in fact more a means than an end in itself. Production volumes, and thus launch frequency, partly determine SpaceX’s economic equilibrium by reducing, with each launch, the marginal cost of the partially reusable Falcon 9 launcher. The European Commission is fully aware of this issue, as its IRIS² project, Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite, foresees a fleet of around three hundred satellites.
Beyond the official messaging, Europe’s priority is to secure its access to space, rely on its own infrastructures for civil and military reconnaissance and telecommunications capabilities, and provide its industry with the means to regain competitiveness. One of the factors that could undermine these objectives, for both BROMO and the future IRIS² constellation, is the time constraint.
IRIS², whose manufacturing is expected to involve the three companies brought together under the BROMO project, was initially scheduled for 2027. Its entry into service has since been postponed to 2030, a deadline already considered largely unrealistic by some observers. As a result, Europe will not have a strategic constellation for at least five years, a considerable amount of time in a New Space sector undergoing constant transformation.
In the meantime, the continuous loss of market share that began around 2008 for European space manufacturers risks intensifying with the rise of new actors. Jeff Bezos’s Kuiper constellation plans to begin deployment at the end of 2025 and aims to place approximately 3,200 satellites into orbit by 2028. On the Chinese side, the Guowang constellation, whose deployment has already begun, plans to have launched 10 percent of a total fleet of around 13,000 satellites by 2029. Thus, if the downward trend observed by the European Space Agency between 2018 and 2023 were to continue linearly over the next five years, Europe would control only around 3 percent of the satellite market by 2030.
Beyond purely economic considerations, Europe is under pressure from all sides. The Ukrainian theater has highlighted Europe’s space vulnerability, with low Earth orbit emerging as a central element of wartime resilience. At the same time, the United States is increasingly pressing Europeans to no longer bear alone the burden of defending the continent, including in the space domain. Europe therefore needs a modern and resilient space sector now, not in five years. The urgency of the situation led, earlier this year, the Italian government to engage in talks with Starlink to establish secure governmental communications via Musk’s infrastructure. The president of the Italian Space Agency, Teodoro Valente, has also stated that exploring alternative solutions is a necessity for Italy, given the delays affecting IRIS². The merger, while necessary, may therefore come too late to reverse the trend of Europe’s space decline.
