“Yes!” A silence. A long silence. A long enough silence in an interview when you weren’t planning to launch straight away. A silence that contrasts with Stan Rudenko’s enthusiasm. A silence that, as we’ll understand in retrospect, testifies to the rational side of this entrepreneur who was rocked by the sounds of Soviet rockets some forty years ago. The question was simple. “Do you want to create a European SpaceX?”
It would take a second question for the engines to start humming... “Knowing that Europe has spent €4bn on Ariane 6, which is not reusable, cannot carry a habitable spacecraft and will only be launched 10 times a year, how much investment do you need?” It was at this point that the son of the man who presided over the launch of the Soviet Zenits in the mid-1980s opened up about his project for a reusable launcher and a habitable spacecraft.
“Of course, when you compare what Europe has with what Nasa has achieved with an investment of $800m, with SpaceX and Northrop Grumman, the Falcon 9 with Dragon and the Antares with Cygnus... It’s a political question. The European Space Agency (ESA) is beginning to understand the situation. That’s why they’ve started by announcing a new call for candidates for a new spacecraft. Which is rather amusing, since they are announcing this when they don’t have a launcher... But they’ve also just launched a call for ideas for new launchers. They want to get ideas from industry, what the next generation of launchers should be, so that when they secure the new budget in 2025, they can open up the public market and deliver the next generation to industry.”
€650m to find
Last Sunday, , which has been registered in Luxembourg since 21 February 2024, submitted its application to the ESA. The entrepreneur ended up saying that in total, between the design and the launches, he would have to raise €650m. “So far, we’ve been self-financing because we started by working on the design, so we didn’t need a big team or spend a lot of money. Now, to finish the design and move on to construction, we’ll need a very different envelope.”
“There are two approaches,” he adds. “The first, like SpaceX, is to build everything from scratch, with the exception of the engine. Northrop Grumman didn’t build anything from scratch. For the launcher, they went to Ukraine. They bought an engine from Russia. Most of the spacecraft was ordered from Thales Alenia Space in Europe,” he says.
“In the world of startups, it’s the same. Take Isar, a German company that started from scratch, has raised a lot of money--around €400m--but still has neither a launcher nor a spacecraft. Rocket Factory Augsburg, which uses many parts produced by OHB, one of Europe’s biggest space companies, has raised around a hundred million. It already has a launcher on a launch pad. Our approach is more like the second. The people in my team were top execs on the Antares, Zenit and other projects. They built some of the most interesting models this side of the Atlantic.”
An international consortium to lease Baikonur?
The team’s technology director is Russia’s Sergey Alekseevich Sopov, who served as the first director of Kazakhstan’s Space Research Agency (1991-1993), CEO of state aerospace company Coscom (1993-1995), CEO of Avialeasing Aviation Company (1996-2015), CEO of Perm Engines Corporation (2001-2013), director of multinational spacecraft launch company Sea Launch (2015-2019) and CEO of S7 Space LLC (2016-2019). There would be a book to write about this superstar of the Russian space epic, but let’s remember two or three facts in the context of Europe’s SpaceX.
In 1988, Sopov played a key role in the historic launch of the Energia-Buran reusable space transportation system, as head of the preparation and launch team, a programme that was abandoned five years later; he was responsible for leasing the Baikonur complex to the Russian Federation and is currently working on the idea of an international consortium operating on the basis of the United Nations Charter and international agreements providing for the special status of the spaceport to guarantee all UN members free access to outer space, with the exception of the launch into space of weapons or elements of national space systems used for military purposes, he told Kazakh media last week.
Baikonur, once the centre of Soviet space exploration, is one of the two launch sites that Rudenko is targeting. “We are thinking of using both Kazakhstan and Kourou (in French Guiana) to have flexibility. At the moment, we understand that to be able to launch loads from European institutions, a company would have to use a European launch infrastructure,” he explains. “In Kazakhstan, we are probably going to buy a piece of the existing launch zone. In Baikonur, there’s desert and sea, 60,000 to 70,000 people. There are many launch pads. Some of the launch pads are leased by Russia, others are not. We’re not talking about Russian launch pads. There are many more launch pads than necessary because they were built in the heyday of Russian space. Today, Russia has only two programmes at Baikonur, Proton and Soyuz, including the crewed version. And Baikonur is the ideal place to send things to the International Space Station: a craft can reach the ISS in six hours, compared with two days from Cape Canaveral.”
Another aspect supports the idea of Baikonur. “Ariane 6 normally launches nine times a year. With the reusable system, we could go to 100, of course not within three years. As we can see with SpaceX, they went from a reusable launcher to 100 launches in ten years. For them, it was harder than for us, because they used Cape Canaveral and had to land in the ocean, which is a big problem. It will be a big problem for any European player who only uses Kourou or a launch pad in northern Europe. Only the Americans are able to do this because they have been carrying out tests since the 1980s. At Baikonur, we could land in the desert. It will be super simple.”
An almost mathematical success for whoever manages to take off
The founder and CEO of Aspire Space is quick to return to facts and mathematics. “Ariane 6 is a good vehicle, which consolidates Europe’s sovereign access to space. If Europeans didn’t want to entrust certain payloads to the Americans or Indians, they can launch them with Ariane, but for commercial projects or those in the fast-growing space economy, a very different volume is needed. The ESA has ‘protected’ research into how to put 10,000 tonnes into low orbit each year. 10,000 tonnes represents 100 launches of 100 tonnes. With Ariane, you have a maximum of 25 tonnes and ten launches a year. It just doesn’t work.”
“In 2030, the space economy will be really big. There will be a lot of things in low orbit and on the Moon, not just satellites, but also data centres, recharging stations with solar panels, industry in orbit and many other things that the public thinks are science fiction. All the connectivity, all the internet, all the internet of things, all the machine to machine, all this will use low or even very low orbit. Starlink will launch 40,000 satellites. In the second version of Starlink, a satellite will weigh more than a tonne. Do the math! And you’ll have to replace them every three to five years.”
I love Luxembourg. I think it’s the most open from a global point of view in Europe and France or Germany would be more bureaucratic and more closed to someone who isn’t local...
This is also why he says that the project will take off as quickly as any other launcher. And, incidentally, that Europe is wrong to ‘sell off’ the first Ariane 6 flights, especially to Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Kuiper. Here again, we need to go into a bit more detail.
Since 2022, Bezos’ company has announced that it has secured 18 launches with Ariane 6, as part of an overall plan for 83 launches--the others being entrusted to Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance--for several billion dollars. Amazon only has until July 2026 to put half of its 3,236 satellites into low-Earth orbit. In other words, it would be all the easier for Europe to break even sooner if Amazon has enough cash and the constellation will compete with its terrestrial and satellite operators…
But if the project’s links with the former Soviet republic are so close, why restart from Luxembourg? “I grew up in Baikonur. My father was a space engineer in charge of launching Zenit, the most advanced rocket in the world in the 1980s. I was five years old when I saw my first launch and I was fascinated by the launcher. Lots of boys dream of becoming astronauts. Not me, though. I love rockets. It was an obvious choice to return to this industry. I’ve been trying to register my company in Luxembourg for two and a half years! In Singapore, it could have been sorted out in one form…”
“But I love Luxembourg. I think it’s the most open from a global point of view in Europe and France or Germany would be more bureaucratic and more closed to someone who isn’t local... What we want to do is a European business. We have to have a head office in Europe, and not just anywhere in Europe: we couldn’t go to the UK. With my highly experienced team, we can radically change the landscape in Europe. We have the technology, we have the understanding, we have the market and we have the team. Pretty much everything to do things very differently to what has been done in Europe before. The rocket that Elon bought in Russia to start with... was built by my chief technology officer.”
This article was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano