The European Space Agency (ESA) pressed the button on Wednesday to create a European version of SpaceX by selecting two companies to provide commercial cargo services to the International Space Station (ISS).
The Exploration Company (TEC), a Franco-German company set up just three years ago, and Thales Alenia Space, a Franco-Italian space systems supplier, each won an initial €25 million in funding to build a commercially reliable service to low Earth orbit by 2028, the Financial Times (FT) reported. The second round of funding, expected to be in the hundreds of thousands of euros, will be decided at the next ESA ministerial meeting in 2025.
This is ESA’s first concrete step towards adopting the strategy pioneered by the US space agency NASA nearly 20 years ago of buying flight services from commercial companies instead of developing rockets and spacecraft.
NASA’s strategy of awarding fixed-price service contracts was crucial to the growth of SpaceX, which now provides launch, cargo and crew services to the ISS.
ESA commercialisation in full swing
“The signing of the contracts for the low Earth orbit cargo return service shows how ESA is modernising to meet the needs of the next era of the space economy,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher, who since taking office has pushed for a more commercial approach to procurement to feed Europe’s space sector and reduce costs.
ESA hopes these vehicles can also be adapted for human spaceflight or lunar missions.
“We want to have the capabilities to allow crewed transport to low Earth orbit or to bring cargo from the Lunar Gateway [the space station being developed by Nasa and partners that will orbit the Moon],” Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA’s director of human and robotic exploration, told the FT in a recent interview.
ESA’s budget is very small compared to NASA’s
This strategy is based on NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) programme, launched in 2006. However, ESA’s funding is much smaller than that which has enabled SpaceX’s success. NASA initially provided more than $400 million to two companies, including SpaceX, to develop a vehicle that could provide resupply services to the ISS, and agreed fixed-price contracts worth $3.4 billion over two years.
ESA only has €75 million for this first phase. The €25 million not allocated in Wednesday’s announcement was expected to be awarded to a third bidder, believed to be MaiaSpace, a subsidiary of France’s Ariane Group.
Startup raises $70m in three years
Even before ESA launched the cargo vehicle competition last December, both TEC and Thales Alenia Space were working on their own cargo vehicle designs.
TEC, which has raised around $70 million in funding since it was founded in 2021, said the contract was a “milestone achievement” for the Nyx vehicle.
Thales Alenia Space said the cargo programme comes at a time when the space exploration landscape is rapidly evolving, with corporate and commercial players embarking on missions to explore low Earth orbit, the Moon and Mars.
