May 11, 2026

Dear European Space Decision-Makers,

As Italy’s former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, I represented my country at G7 and G20 summits on trade and international economics and I watched something deeply frustrating unfold: billions in European public funding for space flowing out of the continent. Too much of what remained was isolated in disconnected initiatives that never achieved the scale required to compete.

European governments are rightly spending billions to shape the global space economy. Yet a growing share of that money is building someone else’s industry. This has long been accepted as an unavoidable trade-off. In reality, it is the direct result of a procurement system that was never designed for today’s fast-moving commercial space market.

The consequences are far more serious than most admit and there is a far better path forward.

Europe has world-class companies, engineering talent, and institutional credibility. What it lacks is the market infrastructure required to ensure that when public money is committed, contracts, supply chains, and transaction flows systematically reinforce the European industrial base.

I saw this repeatedly in the government. Europe built Copernicus, arguably the most advanced Earth observation system in the world, and helped create a new generation of space technology startups through public funding and research programs. Yet too often, as these companies moved from research to commercial scale, they were forced to seek capital, market access, or strategic expansion outside Europe. In parallel, an increasing share of the downstream commercial value generated by European space assets and data flowed through non-European Big Tech infrastructures.

In this current period of constrained budgets and heightened competition, 100 percent industrial return, meaning that public spending systematically translates into industrial activity, supplier participation, and long-term economic capability within Europe, should be the baseline, not merely an aspiration.

No amount of policy language will close this gap without a dedicated execution layer, one that can align demand across sovereign buyers, integrate European suppliers into competitive programs, and synchronize capital flows across public and private sources.

Europe has no shortage of ambition. What it lacks is a neutral execution architecture capable of coordinating sovereign demand, industry, and capital at commercial speed. And it is precisely this gap between policy ambition and executable market coordination that led us to build Nebex.  

Nebex provides the market infrastructure layer that connects space companies directly to buyers and capital across countries and sectors. For European governments, that means public investment stays anchored in domestic industry. For European industry, it means access to a broader international demand base without sacrificing the industrial return their governments require.

I had conversations with European ministers who were fully supportive of investing in space, but increasingly under pressure to explain why public capital was strengthening industrial ecosystems outside Europe faster than inside it. At the same time, many founders and engineers building extraordinary technologies in Europe told me a similar story: public funding could help finance innovation, but competing globally required patient capital, industrial coordination, procurement access, and the ability to scale commercially over the long term.

Though Europe's political and industrial leadership increasingly understands the stakes, the mechanisms built for a technical, state-driven era are struggling to keep pace with today's commercial market. The missing element is structural: a coordination capable of operating at the speed the commercial space market now demands.

This mechanism not only guarantees return to countries but also simultaneously expands market access for companies. History is consistent: industries that begin with sovereign investment and engineering ambition need more than policy alone to reach global commercial scale. Market infrastructure that enables capital to support demand and industrial capacity is the story, the European story, of the expansion of industries across land, sea, and air.

Space is the next opportunity to prove it again.

Manlio Di Stefano
VP, Global Markets
Nebex