🚇 Mind the Launch Gap

Open Cosmos 🇬🇧 says it now turns out a satellite a day across four factories. EnduroSat 🇧🇬 is aiming at several dozen a month and has just raised €178m to get there. Riot Ventures and Atreides Management led the round; the European Innovation Council fund 🇪🇺, Omnes Capital 🇫🇷, Founders Fund and GV followed. In three weeks, Europe's private space companies have between them banked €1.03bn: Open Cosmos €300m, The Exploration Company 🇩🇪 around €390m, PLD Space 🇪🇸 another €108m on a Series C now at €288m, HyImpulse 🇩🇪 upwards of €50m.

The rockets are not keeping pace. Ariane 6 has flown four times this year; Arianespace 🇫🇷 hopes for nine or ten flights in 2027. Isar Aerospace 🇩🇪 has just put five CubeSats into orbit from Andøya 🇳🇴, one of them an EnduroSat demonstrator, on the back of €197.8m in ESA funding. So Europe will keep buying launch slots from SpaceX, and it should. Throttling production until a sovereign launcher matures would hand the market to others. Launch is still the one link a foreign government can sever overnight, though, and Europe has no cadence of its own to fall back on.

EnduroSat's own hedge is to become a little less European. A slice of the €178m goes to a high-cadence factory in the United States. Within a week the company won 40 satellites for TrustPoint's navigation constellation and the first units of Pulse, Vantor's Earth-observation network; in American defence procurement, building on US soil is often the price of admission. Its German subsidiary, meanwhile, leads a consortium ESA has selected for an all-weather observation mission.

The commercial thesis is a price: €0.90 per gigabyte of satellite data, against several hundred euros today. At that level an agricultural insurer buys imagery the way it buys cloud storage, and the customer base stretches well beyond space agencies and defence ministries. EnduroSat claims 400 customers under contract and had 325 staff at the start of the year.

Then there is Dobroslavtsi, 15km north of Sofia, where nothing has taken off in 25 years. EnduroSat wants 290 hectares of clean rooms and test benches on the old runway. Morphosis 🇷🇴 joined the cap table in 2025 through a fund backed in part by EU recovery money, so European capital is in the room. The two funds steering the €178m are American. For now the site amounts to a signed memorandum and a stretch of scrub, and the 1,000 promised jobs are a press release. Europe's aerospace map used to read Toulouse, Bremen, Turin. It now runs through a cracked strip of concrete in Bulgaria.