Integration or fragmentation? The stark choice faced by Europe’s space sector
Europe’s space sector must decide whether to work together and integrate or go it alone. But if it chooses the latter strategy then opportunities will be missed, says Sylvain D’Hoine, Director of Space Vertical at Sopra Steria’s CS Group.
In October 2025, Airbus, Thales and Leonardo announced plans to merge their space activities into a joint venture known as Bromo, bringing together €6.5bn in revenue and 25,000 employees. Such consolidation reflects a shifting market reality. The global space economy now exceeds $626bn and is expected to surpass $1tn by 2034. Yet while industry is regrouping, Europe’s governments are struggling to align.
The 2022 shock – and its aftermath
When Russia withdrew its Soyuz rockets from Kourou in 2022, Europe was forced to confront the extent of its structural dependence. “It was a critical illustration of launcher delays, with Ariane 6 not yet available,” says Sylvain D’Hoine, Director of Space Programmes at Sopra Steria’s CS Group. “But it was also a wake-up call. Europe realised it had to respond and is doing so,” he says.
Four years on, the awakening continues, but progress remains slow. Dependencies extend beyond just launchers, with Europe also remaining reliant on external suppliers for electronic components.
However, more pressing still, according to D’Hoine, is Europe’s dependence on cloud infrastructure. As the volume of data to be processed continues to multiply – from Copernicus imagery to space surveillance and ground segment-as-a-service – Europe often finds itself constrained. “The challenge is to prevent all this data from ending up on US cloud platforms,” he warns. “Hence the need for European hyperscalers.”
An organisational problem, not a budgetary one
In December 2025, the European Space Agency (ESA) approved a record budget of €22.3bn for space applications, the largest in its history. Europe’s difficulty, therefore, is not a lack of funding, but how that funding is deployed. A McKinsey report published in November 2025 on the European space ecosystem points out that resources are currently allocated through a fragmented institutional framework in which governments, the ESA, EUSPA, national agencies and armed forces all operate according to their own priorities.
The consequences of this lack of a holistic approach are clear. In 2024, Europe conducted just three orbital launches, compared with 154 for the US and 68 for China. It’s not a one-off either. Europe’s share of global launches has been in steady decline for a decade.
The principle of geographical return – whereby each ESA member state expects its contributions to translate into domestic contracts – fragments industrial supply chains and slows decision-making. Meanwhile, national investment in space defence is increasing, with countries developing sovereign capabilities in parallel and without any guarantee of coordination. The pull of national retrenchment is tangible.
Andrius Kubilius, the European commissioner for defence and space, warned at the European Space Conference in January 2026 that while national space investments are rising, fragmentation is weakening collective deterrence. Interoperability, he argued, must be built in from the outset rather than retrofitted.
D’Hoine shares that concern. “The issue is not only financial. Europe has the capabilities. The question is whether we can use them, bring them together and move faster,” he says. It’s clear that it’s not money that is lacking, but that decision-making is too slow for market pace.
Software and integration as levers for convergence
So, in the face of such fragmentation, what levers can Europe realistically pull in the near term, without waiting for institutional reform that may take years? D’Hoine points to two.
The first is software excellence, he says. “Software can be a major competitive lever, rather than trying to catch up on hardware. Take Starlink, it performs automated debris avoidance on board using AI. It is faster and more efficient [than traditional methods].”
The priority is to digitise the lifecycle as early as possible, using digital twins in place of hardware prototypes, simulation to accelerate R&D and automation of the ground segment. GOSMIC, the cloud-native platform developed by CS Group, exemplifies this approach. For next-generation multi-orbit constellations, managing hundreds of satellites requires full automation. “We are cloud-native,” says D’Hoine. “The benefits are agility, real-time updates, scalability and resilience,” he continues. Where a traditional constellation might require hundreds of operators, a platform such as GOSMIC enables AI-driven optimisation.
The second lever is the capacity to centralise expertise. Europe does not need to rebuild everything from scratch; it already possesses national capabilities in surveillance, observation and communications. What is missing is the architecture to make them interoperable.
Kubilius has already floated the idea of a Virtual Commons Centre to pool surveillance capabilities across countries and this is precisely the role Sopra Steria’s CS Group seeks to play as a systems integrator. “We position our open, interoperable architectures to merge different space surveillance capabilities or to integrate those provided by European countries,” D’Hoine explains.
The acquisition of Starion, which places Sopra Steria among the top three players in Europe’s space digital sector with more than 1,600 dedicated staff, strengthens this dual capability. “The CS Group–Sopra Steria combination makes sense. Sopra Steria brings expertise in optimising telecom signals on terrestrial networks. The aim is to apply that expertise to satellite networks,” he says.
This digital–space convergence speaks directly to the integration gap that purely institutional programmes have struggled to bridge. In an ecosystem where public agencies define the framework, but execution speed is lacking, private integrators capable of enabling systems to work together are becoming strategically important.
Volume, speed, integration
In the emerging space race, Europe does not need to replicate SpaceX – nor does it have the industrial capacity to do so. But equally it can’t afford to let national strategies evolve in parallel, each too small to carry weight on the global stage.
What is required is, first, scale to spread costs and reach critical mass; second, speed so that decisions do not take years to materialise; and third, integration so that national capabilities become building blocks of a common architecture rather than competing silos. “For Europe to regain its strength as a space power, it is essential to avoid fragmentation through interoperability,” D’Hoine insists.
The question is no longer whether Europe has the means to match its space ambitions, it is whether it has the will to share them.