All of a sudden, French entrepreneur Hèlene Huby is seemingly everywhere.
This week she is serving as one of two envoys, alongside astronaut Thomas Pesquet, at a high-profile International Space Summit convened by French President Emmanuel Macron. The government’s website for the event describes her as chief executive of “the fastest-growing space company in Europe.”
Also this week, that firm, The Exploration Company, announced a significant capital raise of $450 million in Series C funding. Although not spectacular by the standards of some US space businesses, this is the largest-ever Series C funding round by a Europe-based space company, and likely the largest funding round ever raised by a female-led company in Europe.
And Huby has arrived on center stage in the European space community at a time when there are increasingly urgent questions about the ability of the continent to navigate a future in space as commercial startups in the United States and China race ahead.
A lack of ambition
So many of the biggest European space projects of this decade feel dated. The flagship rocket, the Ariane 6 vehicle, is flying. But its costs are high, it is fully expendable, and its flight rate of 10 launches a year feels antediluvian in the megaconstellation era. Europe’s response to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is a project called IRIS², which is already years behind schedule and has seen its estimated cost balloon to more than $15 billion before much metal has even been cut.
From civil projects, such as space-based data, to military applications, Europe seems to be fighting a losing battle on almost every front. All of this makes Huby refreshing because she is honest about the situation and has big ambitions. She seems to be one of the only people in Europe who recognizes these problems, speaks publicly about them, and is trying to do something about it.
After working for the traditional European space industry for about a decade, at heavyweights Airbus and ArianeGroup, Huby founded The Exploration Company five years ago. Initially, the company focused on building a relatively small cargo capsule to deliver supplies to, and return from, low-Earth orbit. This work has resulted in the Nyx spacecraft, which is now undergoing NASA safety reviews for a cargo mission to the International Space Station as early as November 2028.