Responsive Space Launch: The Industrial Architecture of European Space Resilience
European defence planning now treats space as a domain exposed to attrition, disruption and deliberate attack, rather than as a protected environment guaranteed by distance and deterrence alone. Anti-satellite tests, persistent jamming, cyber intrusions and hybrid actions against space-enabled infrastructure have made clear that the loss or degradation of orbital assets is no longer a remote contingency. For Europe and its allies, this has direct operational consequences. Space-based positioning, navigation and timing, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and secure communications underpin almost every modern military activity. When these capabilities are disrupted, even temporarily, the effects cascade across land, air, maritime and cyber operations. As a result, resilience in space increasingly depends not only on protecting satellites, but on the ability to restore minimum operational capacity quickly. Responsive space launch emerges in this context as a defence-industrial problem: the capacity to integrate, launch and operate replacement assets within compressed timeframes that are meaningful for deterrence, crisis management and continuity of operations.
This report examines responsive space launch from that defence-industrial perspective, rather than as a question of commercial launch competitiveness. It reconstructs how the requirement for rapid reconstitution translates from strategic assumptions into operational needs, capability families and concrete industrial architectures. The analysis maps the European ecosystem of launch integrators, subsystem suppliers and specialised niche providers that collectively determine whether a 24–48 hour launch horizon is realistic. It identifies where production, certification, infrastructure, regulatory processes and capital constraints act as bottlenecks, and where single points of failure persist. The report also situates these industrial dynamics within the current European and Allied policy framework, including national procurement signals, EU financing instruments and NATO validation mechanisms. The objective is to provide the reader with a clear, structured understanding of how European responsive launch capability is being built, where its limits currently lie, and which elements will determine its credibility as a resilience function under contested space conditions.