Sep 15, 2026 · 14 min · 9 segments
When Elon Musk founded SpaceX, he set off a chain reaction that reshaped the global space industry. A former SpaceX engineer turned European investor, a rocket founder in a converted shoe factory in…
For most of the history of the space age, from Sputnik in 1957 to roughly the turn of this century, space was a government business.
Governments built the rockets, governments launched the satellites, governments decided what went up, when it went up, and why.
The costs were enormous, the timelines were measured in decades, and the whole enterprise was driven by national prestige and military competition rather than commercial logic.
Europe built remarkable things in that era.
Copernicus, the Earth observation program, is the biggest of its kind in the world.
He's seen the transformation from the inside.
New space does not mean that I do traditional space in a cheaper manner.
It means much more.
It is really a shift of mindset where the development base and the risk management are treated in a different way with respect to the past.
It applied the logic of a technology startup to an industry that had never thought of itself that way.
Go fast, accept failure as a cost of learning, drive costs down through reusability and scale, don't wait for a government contract to tell you what to build.
The results? Well, SpaceX went from a company that was nearly bankrupt in 2008 to the dominant force in global launch by the mid-2010s.
Europe launched fewer than 10 times.
For most of the history of the space age, from Sputnik in 1957 to roughly the turn of this century, space was a government business.
Governments built the rockets, governments launched the satellites, governments decided what went up, when it went up, and why.
The costs were enormous, the timelines were measured in decades, and the whole enterprise was driven by national prestige and military competition rather than commercial logic.
Europe built remarkable things in that era.
Copernicus, the Earth observation program, is the biggest of its kind in the world.
He's seen the transformation from the inside.
New space does not mean that I do traditional space in a cheaper manner.
It means much more.
It is really a shift of mindset where the development base and the risk management are treated in a different way with respect to the past.
It applied the logic of a technology startup to an industry that had never thought of itself that way.
Go fast, accept failure as a cost of learning, drive costs down through reusability and scale, don't wait for a government contract to tell you what to build.
The results? Well, SpaceX went from a company that was nearly bankrupt in 2008 to the dominant force in global launch by the mid-2010s.
Europe launched fewer than 10 times.
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