Oh… ESA has plenty of heavy lifting capacity and beyond lower orbit. That’s not the limiting factor. Launch base close to the equator and the Ariane 5 series of rocket ( comparable to lift of falcon 9) that was meant to carry the Hermes shuttle. Ariane 6 is coming along nicely. The sat internet Europe is aiming at is not as low orbit intensive as Musk’s endeavour, it’s a mix with geo stationary satellites doing a lot of heavy lifting for non critical latencies and low orbit satellites dealing with triaging to reduce latency for critical uses( in which case the data path stays close to earth ).
Oh… ESA has plenty of heavy lifting capacity and beyond lower orbit. That’s not the limiting factor. Launch base close to the equator and the Ariane 5 series of rocket ( comparable to lift of falcon 9) that was meant to carry the Hermes shuttle. Ariane 6 is coming along nicely. The sat internet Europe is aiming at is not as low orbit intensive as Musk’s endeavour, it’s a mix with geo stationary satellites doing a lot of heavy lifting for non critical latencies and low orbit satellites dealing with triaging to reduce latency for critical uses( in which case the data path stays close to earth ).