The space race and why two donkeys won’t make a horse
Two European aerospace satellite operating companies, France’s Eutelsat and Britain’s OneWeb, are merging in a stock swap deal valued at $3.4 billion with the goal of setting themselves up as Europe’s answer to US leader SpaceX.
Believing that two European companies with the characteristics of Eutelsat and OneWeb are going to be able to rival Elon Musk’s company is like believing that if you put two donkeys together, you can take on a thoroughbred racehorse.
The two companies are very much products of their time. OneWeb was founded in 2012, launched its first satellites in 2019, and went bankrupt in March 2020, after not being able to raise enough capital to secure the deployment of 98% of the network it intended to build. The company managed to emerge from bankruptcy in November 2020 thanks to significant investments from India’s Bharti Global, Eutelsat, Japan’s SoftBank and the British government, and remains convinced that it will be able to build and operate its network of 650 satellites of which it has launched 218, although its size and its delay with respect to the Starlink network, built by SpaceX, is astronomical.
Eutelsat, which already owned 23% of OneWeb’s shares, is a French satellite provider whose high-altitude geostationary satellite infrastructure is used by some 7,000 television and…
