In March 2025 France, Italy and the United Kingdom confirmed an order for 218 additional Aster surface-to-air missiles and, within the same trinational procurement, the faster delivery of missiles that France and Italy had ordered at the end of 2022. Eleven months later, a further amendment to the same contractual framework provided for new capacity in Italy to integrate, maintain and repair Aster missiles. Each step was announced, dated and attributed to the bodies that signed it: the Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation (OCCAR), which contracts on behalf of the participating states, and Eurosam, the grouping formed by MBDA and Thales that acts as prime contractor. What the announcements do not say is what any of this cost, how the cost was divided between missiles delivered earlier, missiles added to the order and the facilities needed to produce them faster, or who owns those facilities once the orders have been delivered. For governments, the answer determines whether public money has bought stock, capacity or both, and whether that capacity can be called on again in a later crisis. For industry and its financiers, it determines whose balance sheet carries the expansion and how its cost is recovered. The question is therefore what the public record establishes about how the 2022–2026 acceleration of Aster production has been contracted and financed, and who holds the production capacity it has created.