Sabre seemed a really interesting space approach that failed from lack of funding.
It’s because the EU is 27 different countries with different regulations while the US is 1. Some work is being done to fix this but remains to be seen if we can reach a point where we have unified capital markets instead of national ones.
The point of the EU is to provide unified markets, and capital flows pretty freely between major European economies (including those outside the EU) so I do not think that is it.
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-france-europe-fighte...
I was rebutting a claim that differences in regulations preventing capital flows. That is not true in general in our globalised world (capital clearly flows freely between many countries) and certainly not true in the EU.
It is possible that the EU loses somewhat from not having the central budget that the US federal government has which which to back big projects, but, in most cases, the bigger EU states are big enough to back most things (as is the UK) but will not do so. The lack of fiscal centralisation in the EU also affects its financial stability but I do not think that is directly related to this problem.
As for sixth general fighters, a number of smaller economies than Germany alone have or plan their own sixth generation fighters, or have done so (some programmes have merged). Again, a difference in attitude and priorities.
Sabre was always a dead end.
And where did that initial money come from? Musks sale of PayPal shares, which he got when PayPal acquired his payments company... Would that have happened if he'd started his payments company in Europe? Would Compaq or an equivalent have been interested in paying for zip2, which provided the initial money to found x.com if he'd built zip2 in Europe?
Musk deliberately and intentionally moved to silicon valley, and I think a big part of the reason was almost certainly that the US is more prepared to invest money in these kinds of ventures.