As Washington restricts access to frontier AI and Europe pushes for tech sovereignty, Berlin says the US still depends on German-built hardware to power its lunar missions.
Germany’s space minister tells Washington that US lunar missions depend on European-built hardware, citing the Orion spacecraft’s European Service Module assembled in Bremen. The remarks come as a transatlantic tech standoff escalates over AI export controls and EU sovereignty measures.TL;DR
Germany’s space minister has a message for Washington: the dependence runs both ways. In an interview with Politico at the VivaTech trade show in Paris this week, Dorothee Bär said Europe provides “critical key technologies” for American space missions, adding bluntly: “Without us, it cannot be done.”
The claim is not bluster. NASA describes the European Service Module as the Orion spacecraft’s “powerhouse,” supplying electricity, propulsion, thermal control, air, and water for the capsule that carried astronauts around the moon during the Artemis II mission earlier this year.
The European Service Module is assembled by Airbus in the northwestern German city of Bremen under a European Space Agency contract, with components from 13 ESA member states and more than 100 suppliers. “Without the European Service Module, the United States would not be able to fly to the moon,” Bär told Politico.
German firm Jena-Optronik also builds the star trackers that help Orion determine its orientation in space. The sensors compare photographs of the star field against an onboard catalogue, allowing the spacecraft’s navigation system to correct its path, according to NASA.
Bär’s remarks land in the middle of a widening transatlantic dispute over technology control. Washington last week ordered Anthropic to shut down its two most powerful AI models for all users worldwide after the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security cited national security concerns, a move that cut off European customers overnight.
That decision galvanised the European Commission’s push for tech sovereignty, which had already produced a sweeping package on 3 June proposing new cloud restrictions, a revised Chips Act, and measures to reduce the bloc’s dependence on American providers. The EU currently relies on non-European countries for more than 80 per cent of key digital products and services, according to the Commission.
The geopolitical backdrop adds urgency. Bär warned that “a strong alliance is forming on the other side, consisting of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran,” and said she does not want those countries to win the race in space, though the nature and depth of that space-specific alliance was not detailed further.
On the American side, private-sector heavyweights SpaceX and Blue Origin are driving the pace. Jeff Bezos told VivaTech attendees on Wednesday that “demand for launch is insatiable” and that Blue Origin already has a “tremendous backlog,” with Blue Origin’s chief executive David Limp telling the conference the company plans to fly again by the end of 2026.
Bär reserved her sharpest criticism for the EU’s own regulatory ambitions. She questioned whether the bloc needs the proposed EU Space Act, presented in June 2025, asking: “Do we really need yet another Act?”
Germany has pushed back against the proposal, and the US administration has threatened retaliatory measures if the rules unfairly target American firms. FCC chair Brendan Carr has signalled that new regulatory burdens could be imposed on European companies if the act proceeds in its current form.
“We want to reduce bureaucracy. Yet at the same time we continue creating new requirements,” Bär said.
The tension between competitiveness and regulation has defined European tech policy for the past year, and the space sector is now caught in the same debate.
The German government is working on a national space law aimed at helping companies roll out technologies faster, a signal that Berlin prefers domestic deregulation to Brussels-led rulemaking.
Europe has struggled to keep pace with the US and China in commercial space. Bär’s pitch reframes the conversation: Europe may lack its own SpaceX, but the hardware that gets Americans to the moon is still stamped “Made in Germany.”
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