Give Europe some space! 3 companies join forces to reach for the stars

Three European aerospace giants plan to combine their space units into a single heavyweight, hoping to boost the continent's space autonomy. The deal was announced on Thursday and has Airbus, Leonardo, and Thales signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to combine their respective space activities into one company. …

[TVU]

I welcome this news as this consolidation should hopefully be able hold its own against the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin.

[Gene Cash]

No... this will get even more top heavy, bureaucratic, and unwieldy.

Shouting "by the power of Greyskull COMBINE!" does not actually work.

[hoofie2002]

The smell of panic in the European Satellite and Space business is real and palpable. The US companies are pulling further and further ahead. Look at the trainwreck which is Ariane 6; 13 years in the making and it's 2 for 3 so far. Needless to say it's lack of reusability makes it obsolete now and very few commercial customers outside Europe will touch it. There are a handful of non-EU customers slated for launch but I will lay money most of them won't happen.

The answer in the EU, as always, is more bureaucracy and more money. Ariane 6 gets 340 million Euros PER YEAR over it's launch cycle.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not going to end well

The three organisations have extremely different approaches to both management and engineering, so much so that are are few, if any, common points of contact. Trying to bring these together into a single entity is going to be like trying to make a jigsaw when you don't have the box lid and you have pieces from three different jigsaws mixed together. Add the desire by some members of manglement to get rid of anyone who's face does not fit some arbitrary standard, plus those who loose the inevitable power struggles in the new organisation, and we will probably see quite a lot of very talented people walk out.

AC since I work for one of the three companies and have worked with the other two for over several decades.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is not going to end well

Having worked with all 3 I concur. The only way to resolve it is to have a completely new (and slimmed down) management structure, and that is something that will not happen. Some sites of each company will not talk to each other now, let alone talk to an ex-competitor.

[lordminty]

That Airbus in Stevenage UK for the chop then

Here's my expectation. The new business will soon say it needs to 'rationalise' to 'realie efficiencies' and the first wave of redundancies will be all the workers in the UK and the closure of the Airbus site in Stevenage UK.

Given that the entire EU space effort was built on the back of UK efforts the likelihood of this ending well is somewhere between zero and a negative number.