BREMEN, GERMANY—Europe’s efforts to foster space entrepreneurship are being hampered by a fragmentation of the region’s market and the lack of a risk-taking mindset, investors and company officials said at the Space Tech Expo here.
“We groom technology leaders, but not market leaders,” said Daniel Biedermann, a partner at investment firm NewSpace Capital. He also bemoaned that entrepreneurs who fail in Europe, unlike in the U.S., are treated as pariahs rather than given the opportunity to learn from their experience and try again.
The attitude toward failure is reflected elsewhere, noted Sven Meyer Brunswick, a principal at Alpine Space Ventures. While the U.S. Space Development Agency has embarked on efforts to buy from legacy companies and new suppliers, helping foster the embrace of startups, “we don’t to that in Europe,” he said at the event.
The view was echoed by Stella Guillen, chief commercial officer of rocket startup Isar Aerospace. “We see the U.S. government being the largest buyer out there and happy to accept risk,” she said, adding that in Europe “we see very much an avoidance of risk at all levels.”
Another challenge for space investors is that in Europe there is a fragmented set of rules in each country that govern investments, so placing them comes with an added burden, Brunswick said, whereas the U.S. has common processes.
The European market fragmentation also plays out in other ways. Biedermann said countries often identify and foster what he called government darlings, local businesses that receive strong financial support somewhat irrespective of their success, distorting the market. “We should let companies go bust,” he argued, “so the ones that survive actually succeed.”
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