Europe had launched five rockets as of November 2025. The United States launched 154 in 2024; China launched 68. Those numbers come from a November 2025 McKinsey & Company report that quantified a gap the European space industry has long felt but rarely measured with this precision. Dr. Jakob Stöber, a partner in McKinsey’s Munich office, was one of the authors.
Stöber leads McKinsey’s work with private equity and strategic investors in the European aerospace and defense sector. He holds a PhD and MSc in mathematics and statistics from the Technical University of Munich and a BSc in physics from the University of Regensburg. Before joining McKinsey, he worked in university research and at an investment bank. Over the past decade, his practice has focused on commercial due diligence, post-merger integration, and M&A strategy for companies and funds operating across the defense-space boundary.
His published output over the past six months maps the capital flows reshaping the European space sector. The McKinsey report “Is Europe still on the launchpad?” found that public spending and private investment in the US and Chinese space markets accelerated faster than in Europe over the past five years, widening the scale gap. It also found that European institutional programs have been slow to market and remain fragmented across national budgets. A €35 billion German commitment and the European Commission’s planned Space Shield were cited as signals that the trend may begin to reverse.
Three months later, in February 2026, Stöber co-authored three more reports anchored to European defense. One mapped €9 billion in annual run-rate cost synergies from supply chain consolidation among Tier 2 and Tier 3 defense suppliers. Another projected that Europe’s NATO members would spend €800 billion on defense by 2030, nearly doubling equipment budgets from 2025. The third examined how defense tech startups in Europe are positioning for long-cycle contracts after surviving a venture funding drought.
The overlap between defense spending and space investment is where Stöber’s work becomes directly relevant to the SmallSat Europe audience. Companies like GomSpace, which reported 72 percent revenue growth in 2025 driven largely by European defense contracts, illustrate the pattern: defense capital is arriving at the same companies that build the satellites. At the SmallSat Symposium in February, investors described the shift in terms that McKinsey’s data supports — space has graduated from a science fair to a serious asset class, with capital flowing toward recurring revenue, defense utility, and companies built to survive the funding cycle.
At SmallSat Europe, Stöber brings the investor’s lens to a conference floor dominated by engineers and operators. His reports have supplied the numbers that frame the European space debate: how much the gap costs, where consolidation creates value, and which companies are positioned to absorb the capital now reshaping the sector’s economics.
Everyone at SmallSat Europe has a business plan. Stöber has the spreadsheet that stress-tests it.
