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Heck the Pentagon probably has a plan B in the drawer for a Starlink-like constellation dated fall 2022 should Musk go more unhinged that he already is. LEO constellations went from ‘interesting’ to ‘paradigm shift’ overnight, nothing to be surprised about.
One of the necessities is cheap access to the orbit, and I just cannot see the national behemoth space agencies developing economic, reusable rockets. The traditional rocket industry in the US was unable to do that either.
The barriers to becoming an agile space company are formidable. When looking at SpaceX, we forget how many space startups from that period are now defunct and forgotten. John Carmack founded one, too; it is gone.
An interesting fact is that they did very well as long as they could conduct cheap tests very often. As their rockets got bigger, they could no longer do that and then they floundered.
Star-Link and reusable rockets now have tremendous military uses which are being demonstrated in Ukraine.
Monetary concerns will take a back seat to that.
Was there a good enough reason to go again?
In contrast, there is a good reason to have re-usable rockets and quick deployment now.
What is religious is the outright aversion to state intervention without good reason.
No, it's coordination between aligned states to do what is needed to improve things in general. GDPR wouldn't have been possible if it were a Danish or Estonian thing only. Same goes for DMA and DSA, the rail packages, anti-competitive rulings, normalisation in standards (like Micro USB and now Type C) and a million other things.
Maybe the reality of a 27-nation collaboration is richer and more complicated than either of these extremes.
There are many relatively market-friendly nations in the EU, especially in the eastern half, but the EU is mostly an extension of the French model and without the British, it really started leaning heavily into the protectionist bureaucratic model. The UK acted as a brake of sorts on those tendencies and its influence is sorely missed, at least by people like me. (Certainly the bureaucrats rejoice.)
* The privatisation of UK railways has been an unmitigated disaster
* The privatisation and selling off of various UK heavy industries (like steel, automobiles, trains, aeroplanes, shipbuilding) has been somewhat of a disaster with the majority of it closing, and the rest being foreign owned. Where the UK were a leader in many areas, they no longer are, with a drastic impact on the people who used to work there. As a counterpoint, France has managed to maintain shipbuilding, airplane, train construction at a pretty good level.
* Where the UK is "better" is financial services - IMO in part due to the English language, in part due to money laundering with the help of the various crown tax havens; and the startup scene - again the English language surely helped, but so did less rigorous labour laws (and that has been slightly relaxed in France).
Anything else come to mind?
"You know what they say about the average Common Market official. He has the organising ability of the Italians, the flexibility of the Germans, and the modesty of the French. And that's topped up by the imagination of the Belgians, the generosity of the Dutch and the intelligence of the Irish."
True. I still think Thierry Breton does a really good job, though, despite being French. Sylvie Goulard would have been a disaster -- she couldn't even speak English!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvie_Goulard
(The wiki page lies and says she speaks English -- no, she really doesn't. Her German is pretty good, though.)
I think a modest proposal for curb stomping the bad French influence in the EU is to have all EU civil servants retake their entrance exams in another language if they originally took it in French. We should also form an alliance to automatically reject Commissioner candidates who 1) don't speak English and 2) speak French at the confirmation hearings in the European Parliament.