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Paper short abstract

Through a multimodal ethnography across the European space sector, we trace how policy and industry actors imagine strategic autonomy and economic competitiveness in constructing a launcher market, with special attention to how these priorities conflict and cohere in the (dis)integration of Europe.

Paper long abstract

Since 2022, Europe has faced a myriad of threats to its strategic autonomy—production delays to the Ariane 6 propelled Europe into a “launcher crisis”, while restricted access to Starlink in Ukraine highlighted Europe’s reliance on foreign infrastructure (Abels 2024; Bennett & Cudney 2026). In response to fears about a lack of access to critical capabilities, the European Union and the European Space Agency (ESA) initiated several infrastructure programmes, including the European Launcher Challenge (ELC). These programmes explicitly integrate private industry to prevent future compromise to European strategic autonomy in space, while trying to close the technological gap between European industry and international competitors.

By stimulating industrial competition between member states, the ESA embraces a privatised innovation sector while disrupting legacy mechanisms of European integration. These emerging programmes and their discursive enactments represent a particular European approach to space commercialisation.

In this paper, we discuss the ELC as a market device, which intervenes into the construction of a commercial European launcher market fraught by conflicting priorities and innovative logics. Using a multi-sited, multimodal ethnography, we follow how Europe is united and dismantled through the rockets it seeks to create. Starting from STS work on market performativity (Muniesa et al., 2007; Callon, 2007, 2016), we draw together SSOS, economic sociology, and innovation studies to understand what makes an infrastructure ‘European’ and how that is performed within shifting industry and policy discourses.