Europe's Space Trilemma

Europe faces a trilemma between strategic autonomy, budgetary constraints, and a lack of privately driven technological catch-up. Dependence on US space assets is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the geopolitical role of satellite infrastructure. Yet Europe’s fragmented institutional architecture and limited public demand constrain the scale needed for reusable launchers, large constellations, and downstream space-based services. At the same time, a purely public response would be fiscally demanding and politically complex to justify. On its own, it would also be unlikely to generate the private-sector risk-taking required for competitive industrial transformation. Europe can ease the trilemma only by changing the pivotal unit of action: consolidating demand at EU level, using procurement as market design, and requiring substantial private co-investment in reusable launch capacity and scalable satellite manufacturing. Ultimately, we argue that strategic autonomy in space will depend on a new public-private settlement in which the EU becomes the central actor for demand aggregation, security-relevant infrastructure, and market creation, while ESA remains focused on science and exploration.