By Federico Pirruccio

11/09/2026 

Brussels wants Airbus, Leonardo and Thales to merge into a single space champion big enough to face down Elon Musk. Ursula von der Leyen has now said so out loud. The problem is not whether Project Bromo is a good idea. It is whether it can be built before the race is already lost. 

On 10 September, under the glass roof of the Grand Palais in Paris, European Commission  President Ursula von der Leyen endorsed Project Bromo, the planned space venture between Airbus, Leonardo and Thales. Her intervention was pointed. Officials usually stay silent on mergers still awaiting clearance, but she named the venture directly and cited it as the reason Europe must loosen its own competition rules. 

She had reason to force the issue. Three months earlier, Elon Musk's SpaceX had completed the largest stock market listing in US history, at a valuation near $1.8 trillion. The company now launches, builds and operates more satellites than every other player on Earth put together. Bromo is the attempt to close that distance. 

The three companies announced the merger in October 2025: a single Toulouse-based firm,  roughly €6.5 billion in combined annual revenue and 25,000 staff, with Airbus holding 35  per cent and Leonardo and Thales 32.5 per cent each. It still needs the Commission's approval, and it arrives at a precarious moment for European space. 

The crisis is not only technological. It is also political. Europe lost independent access to orbit for two years during the launcher crisis, when Ariane 5 was retired before Ariane 6 was ready and Russia's Soyuz became unavailable after the invasion of Ukraine. Rivals in the  United States, and soon China, keep filling low Earth orbit with constellations Europe cannot match. Having led the sector since the 1970s, Europe now holds a fraction of the market it once dominated. 

Defence is where the money gap really bites. The United States accounts for around 60% of all government space spending on the planet while Europe manages about 10%.  Worldwide, defence now makes up roughly half of public space budgets, yet barely 15% of Europe's. The absolute numbers point the same way: US government space spending runs to some $80 billion a year once military and intelligence programmes are counted, against a European public effort, ESA, the EU and national budgets together, of little more than $15 billion. Europe's ministers did respond in November 2025, agreeing a record €22.1 billion for ESA over three years, its steepest rise in a generation. But it remains a mostly civil budget, and against America's military space machine Europe still has no answer.

The logic of merging is real. Fold the French, Italian and cross-border champions together, and you cut the duplication that has long hobbled European space and pool the investment.  Meloni and Macron backed the deal at a joint summit in June; von der Leyen's Paris remarks were the loudest signal yet that Brussels wants it done. 

A good idea, on paper. 

Then come the obstacles, starting with the Commission itself, no stranger to killing national  champions. It blocked the Siemens-Alstom rail merger in 2019 on competition grounds, over  furious objections from Paris and Berlin. Bromo's case is now caught up in a review of the  bloc's merger guidelines, launched this year and due to wrap up in the autumn, which von  der Leyen wants to bend towards European scale. Even then, nothing starts until the  companies formally notify Brussels, and they had not done so by mid-2026. A first-phase  review takes 25 working days, a second phase far longer, and no verdict is expected before  the second half of 2027. 

The industry is nervous too. Rolf Densing, ESA's director of operations, has said the deal  would leave the agency with few places to buy satellites, with Germany's OHB the last  independent European competitor left. OHB CEO Marco Fuchs went further, warning that  Bromo could become a monopoly that could hurt customers and the wider market. 

Even setting the politics aside, a harder truth remains. Bromo cannot rival Starlink on sheer  volume, and it was never meant to. Fleets of thousands of satellites are beyond both  Europe's means and its needs: IRIS², the EU's planned secure network, will run to roughly  290 satellites. Out-launching Musk was never the point. The aim was never to out-launch  Musk. It was to give Europe its own sovereign infrastructure for civil and military  communications. 

The real enemy is time. IRIS² is not expected to be operational before 2030, and the Bromo  partners are central to building it. That leaves Europe without its strategic constellation for  years, in the sharpest phase of the space race yet. By the time it is finished, some analysts  expect Europe's share of the satellite market to have slipped further still. 

The pressure is already visible. With war on its doorstep and Washington pressing it to carry  more of its own defence, Europe's dependence on American systems has become a live  vulnerability. Italy has spent months weighing a five-year deal with Starlink worth around  €1.5 billion that would put the Boot under the protection of SpaceX Starshield, the same  system adopted by the US Space Force; the deal was reportedly approved by its intelligence  and defence establishments, even as Rome publicly plays down the talks. If IRIS² keeps  slipping, more capitals will look across the Atlantic. And Bromo, necessary as it is, may arrive  too late to save Europe's independence in orbit.