The EU’s galactically bad space programme

Europe is lost in space. Ever since the Soviets orbited Yuri Gagarin and America landed men on the moon, Europe has proclaimed the ambition to compete on the final frontier.

More than half a century later, Europe is unable to compete even with India, as in October it became incapable of launching its own payloads into space. 

Protected by political and bureaucratic omertà, and with little curiosity on the part of politicians and journalists, Europe’s clumsy space exploration efforts have forced it to turn for launch services to the Twitter and Tesla tycoon, the anarchist squillionaire Elon Musk.

Europe’s space agency (the UK remains a member) is an example of European chauvinism at its absolute worst, its failures a masterclass in how not to be globally competitive, while spending billions on institutional grandiosity.

As with the internet, where Europe has failed to produce a single global player on the scale of Amazon, Apple, Google, TikTok or Netflix, so it is in space. Europe