Only two companies currently provide cargo delivery to and from the International Space Station, and both are based in the United States. The Exploration Company, which operates out of Germany, France, and Italy, is looking to change that: It just closed a large funding round to further its mission of building Europe’s first reusable space capsule.
The $160 million Series B round will fund the continued development of the Nyx spacecraft, which will be capable of carrying 3,000 kilograms of cargo to and from Earth. The company, which was founded three years ago by aerospace engineers Hélène Huby, Sebastien Reichstat, and Pierre Vine, is aiming to conduct Nyx’s maiden flight to and from the ISS in 2028.
“We are the first company in the world where this is for the first time mainly funded by private investors,” Huby said in a recent interview. This is in contrast to SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which she said was “mainly funded by NASA.”
The new funding, which was led by Balderton Capital and Plural, brings the startup’s total funding to date to over $208 million. The Series B also included participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, NGP Capital, and two sovereign European funds, French Tech Souveraineté and DeepTech & Climate Fonds.
“We’ve been able to deliver on promises in the past three years,” Huby said. “We’ve been able to meet our cash target ever quarter … The investors, they could see that we basically can deliver on time, on cost, on quality.”
The startup has made traction with the European Space Agency (ESA), which has recognized the need to foster native space launch and transportation capabilities. The Exploration Company was awarded a study contract worth around €25 million ($27 million) to develop cargo return services earlier this year. That contract will run through 2026, with additional competitive contract opportunities expected to follow. ESA’s aim is to have at least one capsule launching to the ISS in 2028.
The structure of the contract, called the LEO Cargo Return Service Contract, resembles NASA’s Commercial Orbital Return Transportation Services program that the agency launched in 2006. That program resulted in multibillion-dollar transportation contracts to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation (now Northrop Grumman).
It’s a promising start, but equally promising is the traction The Exploration Company is seeing on the commercial side. Around 90% of the startup’s $770 million contract backlog has come from private station developers Vast, Axiom Space, and Starlab, according to recent reporting.
The Exploration Company’s first demonstrator vehicle launched on the maiden flight of Ariane 6 this summer, though it was not deployed due to an issue with the rocket’s upper stage. The second sub-scale demonstrator mission, called Mission Possible, is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 next year.
“I highly respect what SpaceX has been able to achieve,” Huby said. “We are trying to learn as much as possible from that, we are inspired by what they have achieved. But we also believe the world needs more competition and we want, step by step, to build an alternative. We are very aware that we are late, that we are much smaller, etcetera, but we need to start.”