Opinion
Europe funds the satellite but SpaceX flies it. Stop that.
A Bremen satellite with paying customers is set to launch on an American rocket, while the €22.1 billion pledged in Bremen sits next to European launch firms that need orders. Buy the rockets and the satellite chain becomes fully European.
A satellite from Marble Imaging, a startup founded in Bremen, passed its vibration tests in October and is fully funded. Marble Sat-1 ships to California in December and flies in February 2027. The Bremen startup already earns several million euros a year from more than ten customers, with over €20 million in data contracts waiting, and just raised another €6 million from Cherry Ventures. This is Germany's first commercial very-high-resolution satellite constellation, and it exists. The part that stings: the satellite itself will ride to orbit on SpaceX. Europe's eyes will launch American until the eight rockets the company bought from HyImpulse fly.
What holds the chain broken is not the hardware. The optics come from Polish company Scanway, the platform from satellite manufacturer Reflex Aerospace, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have already put more than €10 million of public money in. The missing piece is the launch order. The company bought eight rockets from HyImpulse, but the SL1 has never flown, and Europe had fewer than ten orbital launches in all of 2025, as co-founder Robert Hook points out. He says the company will stay with SpaceX into next year before a planned transition to European launches. Sceptics say a launch firm that has never flown cannot carry sovereign imagery. But Hook answered that himself: scaling is a question of capital, not technology, and a government launch order is exactly the capital that makes a rocket fly.
In Bremen in November 2025, the ESA member states committed €22.1 billion for three years.
Germany alone raised its contribution past €5 billion, becoming the largest contributor to that Bremen pledge. The states that funded the satellite can fund the ride. And think of what follows. Five years from now, someone finishing a degree in Bremen or Berlin could join a company whose optics, platform and AI are already European, with the launch following as soon as the orders arrive. The company plans thirty satellites by 2030, by Hook's count. That is a supply chain you can build a career on, and a continent that owns its own picture of itself. Finland's ICEYE raised €450 million in June at a valuation above €10 billion, which tells you the demand for sovereign European space intelligence is already real.
The call goes to the people who signed the Bremen cheque. The defence ministries and space agencies should place anchor launch contracts with Europe's small-launch providers now, starting from the tool they already use: the company's first anchor contract, worth €3 million, came under the Copernicus Contributing Missions programme. The answer sits in the pledge made in Bremen: an order book for European rockets, built from money committed, not asked for again. No new budget, no treaty change, just a procurement line moved to the European side of the ledger. The dependency itself is the price tag: Europe depends on non-European providers for very-high-resolution imagery, and the company points to Ukraine, where that coverage was cut off. Fund the ride and the rocket flies. Write to your space agency and ask what Bremen money buys next.