They need funding and the world needs an alternative to American (fascist billionaire owned to boot) retail satellite internet. Starlink has absolutely cornered the market and Kuiper isn’t going to be any less under the boot. Hopefully Canada takes a serious look at it.
People (especially Canadians) have this misguided idea that Canada is somehow “small potatoes”, when we’re something like the 10th largest economy in the world, with a powerful portfolio of natural resources, energy resources, strong research and development capabilities and a well-educated workforce. Just because we’re not a rival to the US or China on our own doesn’t mean we don’t have the potential to make a serious impact on the world stage and the world economy, especially if we can leverage some of our unique advantages when we start deeply cooperating and allying ourselves with some of the other top 10 economies in the world. There are some pretty significant opportunities here.
We need to start acting like we’re one of the 10th largest economies in the world in our own right, and not the US’s pet mini-me. The US isn’t going to like it, and I’m not going to pretend there won’t be economic retaliation (and maybe more) but we need to do it anyway. The US is nobody’s friend anymore, least of all ours.
It’s not just American retail satellite internet:
https://craphound.com/news/2026/01/01/the-post-american-internet-39c3-hamburg-dec-28/
Does the Euro Space Agency have the lift capability to get a serious quantity of satellites into orbit ?
If I’m not mistaken the main reason starlink has the jump on kuiper is because spacex has a massive capability and Bezos’ Blue Origin has struggled.
I can’t see the nazi helping a competitor get their satellites up any more than he helped Bezos.
China maybe ?
Oh… ESA has plenty of heavy lifting capacity and beyond lower orbit. That’s not the limiting factor. Launch base close to the equator and the Ariane 5 series of rocket ( comparable to lift of falcon 9) that was meant to carry the Hermes shuttle. Ariane 6 is coming along nicely. The sat internet Europe is aiming at is not as low orbit intensive as Musk’s endeavour, it’s a mix with geo stationary satellites doing a lot of heavy lifting for non critical latencies and low orbit satellites dealing with triaging to reduce latency for critical uses( in which case the data path stays close to earth ).
Next year, the site at Kiruna will be available for launching satellites and I think there was a site in Norway that tries to be ready before the Kiruna site. But I have no idea what the situation is on rockets and everything else that is need to launch a satellite.
