For a European spacecraft designer, access to radiation testing does not end with finding an accelerator that can produce the required particle. A usable test campaign needs a technically suitable beam, an obtainable slot, a prepared device and test bench, appropriate dosimetry and monitoring, a test plan matched to the intended application, and results that can be traced back to the flight design and accepted within the programme’s radiation-hardness process. These conditions do not necessarily fail at the same point. An accelerator can exist without being available when it is needed; beam time can be obtained and then consumed by set-up rather than irradiation; and a technically successful exposure can still produce evidence that is insufficient for a particular qualification decision. Public debate about European testing capacity tends to reduce these conditions to a single question of whether there are enough beams. The more useful question is whether Europe’s constraint lies in the number of accelerators, or in the capacity to convert access to an irradiation source into acceptable qualification evidence within a programme’s schedule, and what the public record allows anyone to say about either.