Airbus, Eutelsat, SES, Thales, and other European satellite companies plan to bid for the IRIS² satellite constellation, hoping to rival SpaceX's Starlink
The bid includes large players such as Airbus Defence and Space, Eutelsat, and SES. — A consortium of nearly every major …
Context & Ripple Effects
This bid lands between two milestones in Brussels' push for a sovereign constellation: the European Commission had already cleared plans for a €6B satellite internet system in early 2022 despite objections from its internal watchdog, and the consortium of Airbus Defence and Space, Eutelsat, SES, Thales, and other major players is positioning itself as the natural industrial partner.
The bet matters because Starlink was already scaling fast, and the same operators bidding here would later face investor alarm over soaring debt at Eutelsat and SES as Starlink passed 6,000 satellites — making IRIS²'s public funding their most credible path to scale.
First-order effects
- The named players pool manufacturing and operator capacity into one consortium to capture what becomes the €10.6B Iris² contract, 61% publicly funded, giving Airbus, Eutelsat, SES, and Thales an anchor customer they could not match commercially against Starlink.
- Eutelsat and SES convert sovereign demand into backlog, directly offsetting the commercial subscriber losses documented in later coverage.
Second-order effects
- Consortium logic hardens into structure: Airbus, Leonardo, and Thales proceed to a deal combining their space businesses promising significant synergies, explicitly framed as building a European SpaceX competitor.
- Once IRIS² locks in a protected European supply base, Brussels' calculus flips — the EU later proposes access rules letting non-European companies like SpaceX bid for the airwaves while reserving 33%+ of licenses locally, forcing the incumbents to defend their home market rather than just win it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, European space consolidates from fragmented national champions into fewer, state-underwritten platforms — with procurement shifting from protecting incumbents toward managed competition that lets outside bidders in under quotas.
- Starlink's continued subscriber climb means the consortium's economics stay dependent on public budgets, raising the long-term question of whether subsidized scale can ever close the cost gap without further mergers among the remaining operators.
The trend: Europe is consolidating its satellite industry around publicly funded constellations as its answer to Starlink's scale, with Brussels gradually trading pure protectionism for quota-managed competition.