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The European Space Agency fired the launch gun in its attempt to create a European version of SpaceX, selecting two companies on Wednesday to develop commercial cargo services for the International Space Station.
The Exploration Company, a Franco-German start-up founded just three years ago, and Thales Alenia Space, a Franco-Italian space systems supplier, beat out several other contenders to secure €25 million in seed funding to build a commercially credible low-level service. -Earth orbit until 2028. 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.
The move marks ESA’s first concrete step in emulating a strategy pioneered nearly 20 years ago by the US space agency NASA, in which it will buy flight services from commercial companies rather than outsource the development of rockets and spacecraft.
NASA’s strategy of awarding development funding and subsequent fixed-price service contracts has been essential to the success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, today one of the world’s most reliable suppliers of launch, cargo and crew services to the ISS.
“The signing of the low-orbit payload return contracts shows how ESA has modernized to meet the demands of the next era of the space economy,” said Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s director-general, who since his appointment has pushed for a more commercial approach to procurement to help develop Europe’s space sector and reduce costs.
ESA hopes the vehicles could even be adapted for human spaceflight or lunar missions.
“We want to have evolutionary capabilities that will either allow crewed transport to low Earth orbit or transport cargo back from the Lunar Gateway. [the space station being developed by Nasa and partners which will orbit the Moon]” said Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA’s director of human and robotics research, in a recent interview with the Financial Times.
The strategy is based on NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which was launched in 2006. However, the amounts made available by ESA are much smaller than those that led to the success of SpaceX. NASA initially awarded more than $400 million to two companies, including SpaceX, to develop a vehicle capable of resupplying the ISS and agreed to $3.4 billion in fixed-price contracts over two years.
ESA only has €75 million available for this first phase. The €25 million that was not allocated in Wednesday’s announcement was to be allocated to a third bidder, believed to be MaiaSpace, a subsidiary of France’s ArianeGroup.
But his original proposal was rejected and he will either modify his design or the rest will go to the two existing winners, who will ask for more proposals to improve their vehicles’ capabilities, a person familiar with the discussions said.
Even before ESA launched its call for trucks last December, both TEC and Thales Alenia Space were working on their own truck designs.
TEC, which has raised about $70 million in funding since it was founded in 2021, said the deal was a “milestone” for its Nyx vehicle. ESA became a major client, which was important for NASA’s certification, she said.
Thales Alenia Space said the cargo program came “at a time when the field of space exploration is rapidly developing, with a mix of institutional and commercial players embarking on missions to explore low Earth orbit, the Moon and Mars”. Its goal was to “raise the bar in terms of innovation and efficiency, while strengthening the company’s role as a major player in the coming space economy.”