Bulent Altan

In September, it became the first private European rocket company to launch into orbit from continental Europe.

Bulent Altan is one of the men who helped get Isar's rocket off the ground.

His venture capital firm, Alpine Space Ventures, was an early investor in Isar.

And the European Investment Fund, by the way, was a key investor in Alpine Space.

uh, human capital is so important and also the, uh, business network and whatnot, and that's how we p- uh, put up Alpine Space Ventures.

And, uh, we invest into that indust- space, what we call the space industrial base.

So Bulent Altan's fund has invested in companies across the space ecosystem, as Anders Bohlin calls it.

A propulsion company from Dresden called Morpheus Space, a satellite builder in Berlin called Reflex Aerospace, a Bavarian company called BlackWave making pressure bottles for the space industry, and Constella, which builds thermal imaging satellites in Munich that can see through the clouds to monitor the Earth.

An ecosystem that had to be built from scratch is now real and growing.

One of the people who helped build it is Bulent Altan.

He was one of the first engineers at SpaceX.

He joined in 2004.

He rose to lead the avionics guidance and flight software teams for Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Dragon, and the early Starlink Constellation.

A governance challenge, not just a technology challenge.

Think about what that means.

Yes, Europe has the engineers, it has the science, it has the ideas.