Airbus, Leonardo and Thales have announced a Memorandum of Understanding with the plan to merge their space divisions into a new joint venture.
Airbus will contribute with its Space Systems and Space Digital businesses, coming from Airbus Defence and Space.
Leonardo will contribute with its Space Division, including its shares in Telespazio and Thales Alenia Space.
Thales will mainly contribute with its shares in Thales Alenia Space, Telespazio, and Thales SESO.
This joint venture will be headquartered in Toulouse, and will retain regional divisions in the countries currently operated in (including UK, Germany, Spain and Italy).
EDIT – my comment isnt showing, so I'll add it here: This was announced about 20 hours ago, but surprised not to see any discussion here.
The merger does not include ArianeGroup, and so this is joint venture is not about launch capability and will not be developing rockets. Commentary about SpaceX's starship in the BBC article is a bit irrelevant.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e3gn80v2wo
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This was announced about 20 hours ago, but surprised not to see any discussion here.
The merger does not include ArianeGroup, and so this is joint venture is not about launch capability and will not be developing rockets. Commentary about SpaceX’s starship in the BBC article is a bit irrelevant.
European companies Airbus,Leonardo, and Thales
>have agreed to pool their space operations into a single business
This seems almost destined to disappoint: A multinational three-way of already overbureaucratic companies. To make it even more ungainly, this frankencorp will be spread over not three but five countries:
>In order to protect national interests where necessary, the new business will include five new national companies, in the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain.
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>”There is no way the UK can compete alone,” an Airbus UK spokesperson explained.
I would have been inclined to think the odds are that some single company—and there seem to be some good ones in Europe—would have a better chance of outperforming. Be that as it may, if the above spokesperson is right it would seem to me to mean that The UK (probably all of Europe) has a deeper and wider problem than just the space biz.
:q!