French satellite operator Eutelsat and money-losing UK start-up OneWeb are going for the moonshot: a merger that stakes their future on being able to compete with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
The deal, which was announced on Tuesday, involves an incumbent trying to stave off obsolescence by teaming up with a scrappy tech disrupter — all backed by the French and UK governments who will own 10 and 11 per cent of the new group respectively. Both see the space race as a key to national sovereignty.
That all the disparate parties involved — two governments, Eutelsat, OneWeb and its private sector shareholders, India’s Bharti Global and Japan’s SoftBank — set aside often diverging interests to hammer out the merger shows how much pressure European satellite groups are under.