Comment by panick21_

Can you show some actual evidence of that? Because evidence actually shows that commercial growth in the US outpaces Europe by a gigantic degree. The traditional European companies like Airbus has made lots of loses. European companies are not even competing in the LEO race to any serious degree.

Their 'compete with SpaceX' Ariane 6 rocket has been an unmitigated disaster. And in order to 'compete with SpaceX' they are giving billions in subsidies to Amazon instead, I guess that is better. And its exactly what they didn't want to do when they designed the Ariane 6 program in the first place.

> companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor)

If anything they are a far, far, far inferior competitor of RocketLab. SpaceX isn't even in the same universe as ISAR.

The simple fact is, small rocket companies are not viable, and pretty much all of them are not profitable and/or go bust. RocketLab itself basically never made money from rockets, the pivoted mostly to in-space stuff.

Maybe one of the small European rocket companies can survive if it gets enough support from ESA, but then moving on to anything beyond that is going to be hard.

> NASA, and is heavily investing there

If we look at ESA and EU space budget, we can see that it goes up a bit, but nowhere near close to anything in the US.

So yes, there is some energy in the European space sector, but its very easy to overestimate, and specially if you look at it compared to the US.