Amazon has ordered six additional launches from Europe’s Arianespace as it builds out a satellite network to challenge SpaceX’s Starlink, handing the continent’s space industry a major commercial boost as governments push for greater sovereign capabilities.
The Amazon Leo order, announced Wednesday at the International Space Summit in Paris, takes the total number of launches booked with Arianespace to 24. The company’s owner, ArianeGroup is a joint venture between Airbus and Safran.
Long-term commitments from companies like Amazon provide Europe with the capabilities needed to deploy critical space infrastructure, Arianespace CEO David Cavaillolès said in a statement Wednesday.
The deal comes as European governments increase spending on sovereign space capabilities and private companies, including German rocket maker Isar Aerospace and spacecraft startup The Exploration Company, raise hundreds of millions of euros to scale their businesses.
But the summit also exposed some of the political divisions complicating those ambitions.
The event was co-hosted by France and Germany, but German Chancellor Friedrich Merz did not attend, nor did Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Meanwhile, U.S. space companies including SpaceX and Blue Origin reportedly withdrew after the Trump administration had discouraged companies from attending over concerns about the summit’s European policy agenda.
Reuters reported that the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy held a call with companies and said attendance could suggest support for European policy positions the U.S. opposed, citing unnamed sources.
Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston told CNBC that it was a scheduling conflict and that non-attendance had nothing to do with the U.S. government. The U.S.-based space-tech company builds solar-powered data centers in space.
The White House did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the reports. SpaceX and Blue Origin did not respond to requests for comment on the reasons for their withdrawals.
Europe races to scale
The political tensions come as Europe’s commercial space industry is gathering momentum.
German startup Isar Aerospace last week became the first commercial European company to successfully launch a rocket into orbit, deploying satellites on just its second flight.
The Exploration Company this week announced a $450 million Series C funding round, while Marlan Space and Loft Orbital announced a $1 billion investment to build a 50-satellite, AI-enabled constellation with partners including French AI firm Mistral.
“It’s a technology boom as opposed to a technology bubble,” Mark Boggett, CEO of space investment firm Seraphim Space, told CNBC last week.
Boggett said demand was being driven by areas including defense and resilience, artificial intelligence and space infrastructure, with SpaceX helping bring greater investor attention to the industry.
“The recent IPO of SpaceX is really the inflection point for this market really starting to take off,” he said.
European space ventures attracted a record 1.5 billion euros ($1.75 billion) of private investment in 2024, up 56% from the previous year, according to the European Space Policy Institute. Overall investment slipped 8% to 1.4 billion euros in 2025, but venture capital funding rose 13% to 1.2 billion euros.
Europe’s challenge is increasingly about scale.
Cavaillolès said Wednesday that Europe needs to increase its launch cadence, arguing that the war in Ukraine had turned space sovereignty from a largely political concept into a more urgent concern.
“You cannot win a war if you are not strong in space,” he told the summit.
Isar Aerospace, which raised 270 million euros in June to scale production and expand its launch network, sees infrastructure as another obstacle.
Chief Commercial Officer Stella Guillen told CNBC this week that Europe needs more launch sites and supporting infrastructure if its commercial space industry is to expand.
The political challenge is keeping those investments coordinated across the continent.
European Commissioner for Defence and Space Andrius Kubilius welcomed the additional investment but warned that it could undermine Europe’s ambitions if countries used it to pursue national strategies at the expense of greater European coordination.
“We need to really spend a lot of our efforts to keep this unity on European level, to make our systems interoperable,” Kubilius said Wednesday, arguing that greater coordination would be necessary for Europe to become more sovereign and independent in space.