Europe's space gap is a launch-count problem now, not a vibes problem

Europe's space gap is a launch-count problem now, not a vibes problem

Europe logged seven orbital launches in 2025. The US logged 180. China logged 93. The gap isn't a perception problem — it's a scoreboard problem. Bureaucracy, over-regulation, and uncompetitive power prices are doing a lot of the damage.

Gobble's Take: The US and China are lapping the field. Europe is still filing the paperwork to enter the race. Source: Perplexity Search (community news)

Autonomy is moving from software demo to hardware default

Three stories this week share one thesis: autonomy is no longer a feature bolted on — it's being built into the machine from the start. Astrolab's FLIP rover, riding to the Moon aboard Astrobotic's Griffin-1, swaps the wheeled suspension that has defined planetary rovers since Mars for limbs that lift, level, and place. Meanwhile, Look Up and Skynopy are doing the same thing in orbit: pairing a French radar network with a software-defined ground station layer to pull the human out of the collision-avoidance loop entirely.

Gobble's Take: Fewer dashboards. Fewer humans in the loop. The machines aren't coming — they're already on the launchpad. Source: Perplexity Search (community news)

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• The moral stakes of colonizing space are being argued at a very high bar
• Space expansion is leaving a terrestrial footprint before it ever builds a lunar one
• Mars is still the favorite red planet for big human dreams