European SpaceX Rival Just Won a €760 Million Contract Days After Raising $450 Million to Build Its Own Rocket Engine
A five-year-old European startup just pulled off a double that no company on the continent has managed before, and the ambition behind it points directly at the rocket architecture SpaceX bet everything on with Starship.
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The European Space Agency on Friday awarded The Exploration Company a €760 million contract to build and fly Europe’s first commercial cargo capsule to the International Space Station, signed at the International Space Summit in Paris. ESA describes it as its first and largest capsule transportation service contract awarded to a European company in open competition. The contract covers an initial demonstration mission plus two optional follow-on flights.
The award follows the Munich-based startup’s $450 million funding round that closed days earlier, the largest ever raised by a European space tech company. The raise set the table. The contract is the payoff.
Founder and CEO Helene Huby framed the significance: “This is more than a contract award: it reflects a shift in how we build space technology in Europe. We started the development of Nyx with private funding only, and we are now at a technical maturity level where ESA and Member States’ public funding can support us massively, as anchor clients, to help us finalise the vehicle. It is also the first time in Europe that a five-year-old space startup wins a contract worth hundreds of millions of euros in open competition.”
ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher added: “Today’s agreement with The Exploration Company shows how ESA can act as an anchor customer, strengthening Europe’s commercial space sector and turning ambition into reality.”
Where the $450 Million Goes
Huby has been direct about the deployment of the record European raise: “The majority of this funding is going to accelerate the biggest rocket engine ever developed in Europe, full flow staged combustion, so the most efficient rocket engine cycle in the world.”
Full-flow staged combustion is the same architecture SpaceX chose for its Raptor engine powering Starship. It routes all propellant through preburners before the main chamber, extracting more energy from every kilogram of fuel. It also happens to be the most capital-intensive rocket cycle to develop, which is why Huby was blunt about the funding gap:
“It’s not completely enough because this kind of rocket engine cost actually a lot of money to develop, but it’s more than two thirds of what we need to develop this rocket engine.” The engine program is called Storm.
Demand Book: $1B in Europe, $1B in the US
Helene Huby said the company has already booked substantial commercial demand: “We’ve signed now about 1,000,000,000 in Europe, 1,000,000,000 in United States, and now we need to deliver a lot of capsule.” That is roughly one billion in Europe and one billion in the United States, with pre-booking agreements from commercial space station operators Axiom, Starlab and Vast.
Nyx, Briefly
Nyx is a reusable capsule designed to launch on any heavy-lift rocket, dock autonomously with a space station, and return cargo to Earth. It uses in-house carbon-based thermal protection and proprietary guidance, navigation and flight software. Development runs across Munich, Bordeaux and Turin with expansion into the United States and the UAE. Nyx is in ISS certification with NASA. Separately, The Exploration Company signed a deal with Arianespace to launch the first Nyx capsule on an Ariane 6 rocket from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Full details are available at esa.int.
Investing Angle for SPCX Holders
The incumbent is publicly traded. SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX | SPCX Price Prediction) last changed hands at $149.50, up 0.89% in the premarket session. Over the past month, SPCX has advanced 12.16%, and sits 7.12% below its level three months ago. The company carries a market cap of roughly $1.14 trillion and posted Q2 2026 revenue of $7.81 billion, with its Space segment generating $962 million including $648 million in launch services. See the 8-K filing on SEC.gov for full quarterly disclosures.
The Exploration Company is privately held, so direct exposure is unavailable to public-market investors. It has yet to fly a capsule to the ISS. Its lead customer is a government agency acting as anchor client. SpaceX already operates the cargo and crew services this startup is working toward, and its Starlink Consumer business alone grew 44% year over year last quarter. The realistic read: this is a credible, state-backed effort to end European dependence on a single US launch provider over the next decade. Near-term SpaceX revenue is unlikely to feel it.
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AJ has spent the past 10 years writing about financial markets at The Motley Fool. His coverage centers on technology stocks and the broader macroeconomic trends, from interest rates to geopolitics, that shape where markets are headed next. AJ is drawn to the stories where big-picture economics and individual companies collide.
