Hélène Huby, CEO and Founder of the Exploration Company, sat down with retired ESA astronaut Christer Fuglesang at EQT Ventures’ Scale Summit to discuss the challenges and opportunities of innovating on the final frontier.

What comes after the International Space Station (ISS)? That’s the question that inspired the creation of the Exploration Company, says CEO and Founder, Hélène Huby. Before launching the company, Hélène was working at Airbus on the Orion European Space Module (ESM). The project meant Airbus was working with NASA on a mission-critical element of an American human spaceflight capsule. It was here that she spotted the sheer size of the space exploration opportunity.

In a fireside chat at EQT Ventures’ Scale Summit in Stockholm, Hélène was joined on stage by Christer Fuglesang, a European Space Agency (ESA) veteran of two shuttle trips to the ISS and five spacewalks. In front of an audience of founders, the pair discussed the future of European and global space travel, and the challenges and opportunities of innovating on the final frontier.

We’re in a new phase of space infrastructure

It took 40 launches to build the International Space Station (ISS). Today, says Hélène, ‘it has become much easier to build infrastructure in space’. With rockets like SpaceX’s Starship, stations can be built and assembled with just one launch — and there are several new space stations being built around the Earth and Moon.

Like the ISS, many of these stations are being built with research in mind. But this new generation’s brief is wider and its purpose grander. NASA’s Lunar Gateway, for example, is expected to play a pivotal role in the US’s plans to maintain a human presence on the moon and eventually send astronauts to Mars and beyond. Space tourism and commerce are also increasingly a focus, especially in the private sector, with projects such as the Orbital Reef Space Station, a ‘mixed-use business park 250 miles above Earth’.

Commercial space stations orbiting the Earth could be live in as soon as 18 months.

Military space stations will form a necessary part of this new ecosystem too, Hélène explains. Global geopolitical tensions make it clear that ‘we need to protect our critical infrastructure in situ’.

Space station transportation is a huge market

The challenge — and opportunity — for companies like the Exploration Company is in helping humans travel to, from and around those new stations. The rapid growth expected over the next decade means that the transportation market around these new destinations is estimated to grow from $5 to $50 billion in the next ten years.

This topic is all the more relevant now given the recent challenges in getting the stranded astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams back home from the ISS. As a former ISS visitor, Christer is often asked to comment on what life is like up there for them right now. Above all, ‘will they have enough food and oxygen?’ The answer, reassuringly, is yes, with regular supply ships delivering supplies from earth. But the issues with the Boeing Starliner capsule have highlighted the necessity for accessible, sustainable and cooperative space transportation of both humans and vital supplies.

Europe’s making up for lost time

Both Christer and Hélène admit that Europe is lagging behind the US, Russia and Asia in the global space race. ‘None of the planned [space] stations are European’, says Christer. The fastest way to establish a European market position, as he sees it, is by providing services and transportation to these upcoming stations.

This is exactly the work that Hélène and The Exploration Company are carrying out at pace. Of the four operational transport capsules going to and from space, European companies only have a stake in one: the Orion ESM, built in partnership by Airbus and NASA. The Exploration Company is changing that and has already built two demonstrator capsules in three years. Nyx Earth, the company’s first commercial cargo capsule, designed to sustainably serve space stations in low-Earth orbit, will be ready for its first launch in 2027 and has sold six missions already. The Exploration Company’s ultimate goal is to build ‘space transportation infrastructure that can start from and come back to as many countries in the world as possible, and can go to as many destinations in space as possible.’

The Exploration Company makes space exploration accessible, sustainable, and cooperative. Meet Nyx. A modular and reusable space capsule. Nyx takes off from any heavy launcher in the world to safely deliver cargo to and from space stations in LEO and beyond.

It’s remarkable progress considering where European capsule programs were just a few years ago. ‘We had to convince, together with the European Space Agency, all 22 member states of the European Space Agency to start a capsule programme’, explains Hélène. Following that, The Exploration Company still had to enter the ESA’s competition to build the capsule. ‘When we started, we had no backing from the ESA, from NASA — only EQT Ventures was bold enough to believe in us.’ Ultimately, Hélène and her team won the competition and ranked number one, beating experienced players such as Airbus and Thalès in the process.

Defense and geopolitical power underlines everything

The business case for a strong European space industry is only made stronger by the defense and geopolitical capabilities it provides the continent. ‘What we’re building is not only very, very important for Europe to be a senior partner in space exploration, but it’s also important for Europe to have a defense capacity in space,’ says Hélène. The thermal protection technology the company is developing for reentry of its space capsules can be ‘reused in missiles and hypersonic aircrafts’. Its docking technology — ‘the most reliable in Europe because it will be certified by NASA’ — has the potential to add an extra layer of protection too: ‘Through this we can perform inspection and potentially remove any spy satellites which are flying around [Europe’s] critical assets in space.’

Christer would like to see Europe go even further and establish a lunar base, following the US and China’s lead. Although he doubts the US’s 2026 moon-walk deadline, he’s less skeptical about China’s lunar ambitions, having been impressed by its track record of meeting its space exploration goals. ‘There’s no reason to doubt’ that the country will establish a base by 2035. It’s an ‘important geopolitical game’ that Europe needs to be part of.

To infinity and beyond…

For a company as fast moving and growing as the Exploration Company, there’s a deep understanding that the transport capsule is only the beginning.

‘The first objective is the logistics business, right? It’s building space transportation infrastructure.’ That means food, fuel, research equipment — what Hélène calls ‘civil applications’. Then it’s the defense capabilities that can be learned and executed from the capsules’ initial launches. The next stage is rockets and human space travel, with initial funding already in place to begin work on one of the biggest rocket engines that Europe has ever developed.

It’s also about inspiring the next generation of European deep-tech entrepreneurs to join Hélène and Christer in building up Europe’s space ecosystem. Before leaving the stage, Hélène asks the audience a question that sounds an awful lot like a challenge: ‘Why can’t we build another SpaceX here in Europe?’

For the Exploration Company’s and European space travel, it appears even the sky isn’t the limit.