Europe’s ambition to stop hitching rides on someone else’s spacecraft now has a rough price tag. The Exploration Company, the Munich-based startup building what it bills as Europe’s first reusable space capsule, is in talks to raise at least $300mn, according to the Financial Times.
The round would value the six-year-old firm at more than $2bn, a figure picked up by Bloomberg from the FT’s reporting on July 26, 2026. Neither number is locked in. People familiar with the discussions cautioned that the financing has not been finalised, and the terms could still move, or the deal could fall away entirely.
The comparison to Elon Musk’s company is not idle. The Exploration Company is developing Nyx, a reusable capsule pitched as a European answer to SpaceX’s Dragon, designed to carry cargo, and eventually crew, to the International Space Station and the commercial outposts meant to replace it. That is precisely the niche SpaceX has spent a decade cornering.
Europe currently has no sovereign way of bringing cargo back from orbit, a gap that has left its agencies dependent on American, and previously Russian, hardware. Founded in 2021 by Hélène Huby, a former head of Airbus’s space exploration business, The Exploration Company has framed Nyx as the fix: a capsule that launches, comes home, and flies again, with a crewed version further down the roadmap.
