The European Space Policy Echo Chamber And 'The Last Supper'

If you attended the most popular conferences and symposia on space policymaking around Europe, you may come back home with the idea that the space industry is run by middle-aged white men in suits. And you would be painfully right, and I write this as a middle-aged white man with similar privileges as those wearing the suits. Although I don’t wear a suit. I have one, but I exclusively use it for funerals.

As I sit in the audience at one of such events, all I can think of is how wide the gap between policymakers and policy subjects—i.e., us mortal worker ants—has grown. How disconnected is the world these panelists live in (although calling them panels is misleading as they are in reality mineral water-fueled echo chambers) from the entrepreneurial world dealing with talent shortages, recession, funding gaps, and market hyping.
For someone like me coming from the dungeons inhabited by space nerds, a question pops right up: Is this how space policy is made? Welp.

I would love to run an experiment, which I would call ‘The Last Supper’, where I’d bring one of these policymakers with suit and all to share a meal with a startup team whose runway is a month away from running out, and have him lecture them about the value of ‘resiliency’, ‘synergies’, ‘digitalization’ and ‘sustainable approaches of unlocking innovation’.

Does innovation come from a logoed lectern, delivered in a whirlwind of smarm as everyone absent-mindedly nods in approval while they check their emails? Or does innovation come from the pits, where engineers turn frozen pizza and coffee into functioning space systems on minuscule budgets? Can an MBA in Ralph Lauren define how to create new technology or how to use existing technology in ways it’s never been used before, or push the state of the art of spacecraft, rockets, software and algorithms? Can they understand the mental endurance it takes to run a company, design a product, make a team jell?

Hint: they cannot. All they can do is to insipidly echo “upstream” and “downstream” frequently enough to make everyone believe they dominate the topic.

There are established European actors—to avoid for once the SpaceX-as-gold-standard trap—which are good examples of how you seize markets by keeping your heads down, designing, building, learning and building again. One thing’s for sure: markets are not seized by coming to the battle armed with a deck of slides and a wireless headset as your main weapons.

Last but not least. As a non-European I must ask out loud: what is it with European space policymakers obsessively comparing themselves with the US? Americans can rest assured: their market shares are not at harm, as Europeans are too busy looking to the sides.

Swimmers win their races by looking forward and displacing water with arms and legs like there is no tomorrow; looking to the sides makes them waste precious time and energy. More importantly, looking to the sides won’t make them any faster.