Someone over there has been noticing the new space industry:

New commercial markets, among them space tourism, have a great potential to become major drivers in space technology development. This study aims at the assessment of the feasibility of European initiatives to address these new markets through the development of crewed space vehicles.

The more the merrier, but given Airbus' problems and the general bureaucratic issues over there (even worse than NASA, if that can be believed), I'm not as encouraged as some might be. In addition, they've even more of a nanny-state mentality than we do here, and they'll have trouble getting the kind of flexible regulatory environment with regard to passenger safety that we just won from the FAA. Not to mention the fact that they don't have any natural flight test sites there--they'll have to go to Africa, Asia or the Middle East to find sufficiently large unpopulated areas.

They could always build a moon rocket using parts from the Ariane 5.

*runs*

A European style alt.space commercial sector would likely be heavily subsidized by the EU, like the Ariane operation.

Dang, never woulda guessed that.

I think Europe might have several natural flight test sites... most of them coastal or islands. Might have problems clearing the range of ships, though. I feel that the suborbital ventures will need great scenery during the flight to compete with others, and some places in Europe has fantastic scenery.

Back to Peenemunde!

Arianespace was an X-Prize Cup sponsor last year, and looking to possibly invest or buy into a newspace LV co. They have always been interested in commercial activity, very popular with commercial GEO comm sats. Very commercial-type launch capacity deals, they don't let the big sats take over the whole vehicle, so if other people want to launch innovative small sats in the adapter (Orbital Recovery, others in the past), or on the ASAP ring, they can't be veto'ed by the bigsat. Test ranges in the far north scandinavia?

I think you have to qualify that with "at reasonable latitudes". Lots of empty space in Finland, for example.

Europe's going to have to do something more than create new viewgraphs.

Europe actually has a very good public/private partnership model with the ARTES program. The problem is to walk the fine line between making a business model work and pleasing the political constituencies.

Look for a major announcement from Orbital Recovery in the very near future in the customer arena.

There already is a sounding rocket launch range in Kiruna, northern Sweden. There was some talk of flying Spaceshiptwo from there.

Folks late to the party better have a compelling value proposition or they may be playing catch up for years.

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