Vega is pivoting — or Vega is being bypassed?

Avio races to recover decades of lost launcher initiatives. Will it make it in time?

Vega-C is currently being bypassed by both industry and institutional missions. Is Avio — and Europe through Avio — trying to fix a temporary misalignment on the way to a new, competitive launcher strategy, or quietly sustaining a system whose relevance may never be recovered?

The current situation of Vega-C

At the most recent ESA Ministerial, Italy emerged as the dominant supporter of Vega-C, covering roughly 70% of its programme support. Following the transfer of Vega-C operations from Arianespace to Avio, the launcher has become, in practical terms, an almost entirely Italian industrial endeavour.

Yet in 2025, Italy did not launch a single institutional mission on Vega-C. All 14 IRIDE satellites currently in orbit — Italy’s flagship Earth-observation programme — were launched aboard Falcon 9. The COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation satellite launched in January 2026 followed the same path. Overall, Vega-C flew three times in 2025, launching ESA’s Biomass mission, Airbus’ and CNES’ CO3D and MicroCarb satellites, and South Korea’s KOMPSAT-7.

Italy’s choices are defensible on practical grounds. Vega-C is effectively overbooked until an unspecified future date (its portfolio lists more than 15 flights already booked, which, assuming the current cadence, would imply a schedule filled until around 2030). IRIDE is financed through the PNRR (the European Recovery Fund), with very strict timelines requiring all satellites to be in orbit by 2026. Since Vega-C experienced a two-year hard stop and Italy could not risk losing the funds, the country was pushed to procure launches aboard Falcon 9. Mission timelines, orbital requirements, mass, and cost all matter.

Taken together, however, these decisions expose a structural contradiction: Italy is heavily financing a launcher it does not itself use, even for missions that nominally fall within Vega-C’s performance envelope. The problem is not a lack of orders, but execution speed.

The issue therefore becomes structural — and political. A launcher that flies three times a year is functionally unavailable, and cost compounds the problem. It appears that Avio is not prioritising the fact that this is no longer an era defined solely by institutional missions. It is an era of aggressive competition, primarily from the United States, in which the market has alternatives and speed of execution matters. A publicly supported launcher that remains expensive, slow to book, and inflexible in scheduling will be bypassed — not out of preference or lack of loyalty, but out of necessity.

This raises a legitimate question: what trade-off is Italy implicitly accepting by continuing to fund Vega-C today?

Vega-C and the commercial sector

While Europe continues to promote Ariane 6 and Vega-C as pillars of European launcher sovereignty, the commercial market has already made its choice. European startups and mid-sized operators overwhelmingly rely on Falcon 9 — and, to a lesser extent, Rocket Lab — not out of ideological preference, but structural compatibility.

High launch frequency, flexible scheduling, and predictable pricing now define the launch market for light-to-medium payloads. Vega-C, in its current configuration, does not meet those requirements*.

Even ESA has begun aligning its programmes with this new logic. Beyond the European Launcher Challenge — explicitly aimed at supporting emerging commercial actors with lighter, high-frequency launchers — the agency has launched initiatives such as Moon with Small Missions, designed around lower cost, faster development cycles, and higher mission frequency. Similarly, the Scout missions within ESA’s Earth-observation programme follow an “extremely agile and low-cost development process.” It is not coincidental that the first Scout mission, HydroGNSS, was launched aboard Falcon 9.

The state of the strategic game

Beyond launch choices by operators and institutions, recent strategic decisions at the European level suggest that Vega-C’s marginalization is increasingly being built into the launcher ecosystem itself.

For example, the European Space Agency has announced that responsibility for the liquid-oxygen turbopumps used in Ariane 6’s Vinci and Vulcain 2.1 engines — historically a core Avio competence — will be transferred to ArianeGroup by 2029.

In parallel, Arianespace has recently flagged its intention to replace Ariane 6’s solid-fuel boosters with reusable boosters developed for MaiaSpace. Both the PC120C and the PC160C boosters, shared by Ariane 6 and Vega-C, are currently manufactured in Colleferro, Italy, by Avio for Europropulsion, a French-based joint venture between ArianeGroup and Avio. Arianespace has also stated that it intends to lower the minimum payload capacity of Ariane 6 and its successors to around one tonne, in an effort to increase flexibility and improve economic sustainability — a move that would place Ariane 6 squarely in Vega-C’s traditional performance range.

Furthermore, ESA has indicated that the PC160C will initially be produced exclusively for Ariane 6, reflecting the priority given to increasing Ariane’s payload capacity to meet new commercial commitments, such as Amazon’s Leo constellation. Vega-C, by contrast, does not currently require an immediate performance upgrade for its anticipated missions, and the use of the PC160C on Vega-C Block II (the successor to the current Vega-C Block I) has been deferred until at least 2028. This could translate into maintaining Vega-C largely “as is” for another two to three years.

At this point, the question is no longer whether Vega-C is being bypassed. That is observable. What remains unclear is whether this misalignment is temporary — or structural.

A push to adapt and compete, or to exit?

This is not to say that Avio is technologically stagnant, or that it is not investing in Vega R&D. The misalignment could, in principle, be temporary if Vega-C were being actively repositioned to address these constraints. The difficulty is that current industrial and programmatic signals within Italy suggest a complex, sometimes discordant, and certainly slow dynamic.

On the one hand, Avio appears to be investing heavily in future-oriented technologies. The company is developing new liquid-propulsion methalox engines (MR10 and MR60), financed through European Recovery Funds and ESA contracts. The MR10, which completed a successful static fire test in October 2025 and is currently part of Avio’s FD1 rocket demonstrator, is intended to power Vega-E — the evolution of Vega-C originally expected for 2026 and now pushed to 2027. The MR60 is a more powerful engine, delivering 60 tonnes of thrust, designed to become the building block of Vega-Next, currently expected around 2032 and potentially conceived with a reusable upper stage in mind. Avio’s ESA contract to test a reusable upper stage in 2025 further supports this strategic vision.

These efforts suggest not only an awareness that the launcher market has changed — and that adaptation is unavoidable — but also a desire by Avio (and Italy through it) to break the liquid-propulsion monopoly. In particular, they appear aimed at preserving liquid-propulsion skills that could otherwise be lost following the transfer of turbopump responsibilities to France, and at competing more directly with Arianespace through heavy investment in methalox engines. In principle, this could allow Vega to become competitive in the small-to-medium lift category.

On the other hand, Vega-E and Vega-Next — intended to represent Vega’s evolution toward higher payload capacity (up to three tonnes) and reusability — remain delayed. There is no clear timeline for when, or even whether, they will materialise as operational systems. Meanwhile, while France is investing in a light reusable launcher through MaiaSpace, Italy has chosen not to participate in ESA’s European Launcher Challenge programme, avoiding further fragmentation of investment. As a result, the burden rests almost entirely on Avio. Whether the company can deliver on time remains an open question.

Complicating the strategic picture further is Avio’s growing investment in the U.S. defense missile market. The company’s increasing reliance on U.S. defense contracts for solid-fuel rocket engines, as reflected in its annual reports, points to a parallel hedging strategy: reducing dependence on Vega as a primary revenue source while preserving industrial continuity elsewhere. This is a rational corporate response — but it raises a critical question. Is maintaining solid-propulsion capabilities and pivoting toward airborne defense a Plan A, or a Plan B? And does it risk diverting resources from the rapid evolution of Vega-C toward liquid propulsion and reusability?

Avio appears to be pursuing two parallel paths: one oriented toward future launch technologies, and another aimed at reducing dependence on Vega altogether through U.S. defence work. Whether these paths are meant to converge into a renewed launcher strategy, or to manage a gradual exit from Vega, is impossible to determine at this stage.

Funding, innovation, and the status quo

This ambiguity matters because Vega-C is not a purely commercial project. It is sustained by significant European and national public funding, explicitly justified in the name of sovereignty, autonomy, and strategic access to space. At what point does it stop making sense to continue funding a launcher whose present relevance is weak and whose future progress appears too slow to compete?

Giulio Ranzo, Avio’s CEO, has stated that “maximum efficiency and independence from public support” could be achieved if Vega-C were to reach five to six launches per year. At its current cadence of three launches annually, Vega-C therefore represents a substantial burden on Italian and European taxpayers.

If, however, Avio can bring Vega-E and Vega-Next into operation within a reasonable timeframe and increase launch cadence to at least five launches per year, Vega could become economically sustainable, supportive of European sovereignty, beneficial to the Italian economy, and genuinely competitive within the European launcher market. The question is how long this will take**. It has become a race against time.

Preserving industrial capacity and local expertise is not an illegitimate objective; any country would do the same. But preserving the status quo is only viable as long as competitors do likewise. Once the rules of the game change — as they did with the arrival of Falcon 9 — systems designed primarily around industrial continuity can rapidly lose relevance. A launcher built to protect manufacturing capacity may ultimately fail to protect it at all if it cannot keep pace with external change.

Vega-C risks a similar fate — not because it lacks technical capability, but because it may have been asked to sustain an existing industrial structure rather than adapt aggressively to a launch market now defined by cadence, flexibility, and cost. Will Vega-C raise the bar, evolve, and keep pace — or will it quietly be replaced by a more flexible and efficient Ariane 6? The next five years will tell.

**This article benefited from background interviews with few European commercial space companies, conducted to better understand the constraints and considerations startups face when selecting launch providers. The author thanks Exolaunch, D-Orbit, and other two anonymous startups for their valuable insights.

**Avio was contacted by email and phone on three occasions to request an interview, but did not respond.