Airbus CEO says SpaceX is successful because it’s a selfish American company

The CEO of France’s Airbus (AIR-1.18%) is both impressed and envious of success at its American rival SpaceX. Company head Guillaume Faury told attendees at a German aviation event that SpaceX would never have been able to achieve all it has if it were a European company, Reuters reports.

“I think what the Americans and what SpaceX have done is amazing,” he reportedly said. “It’s amazing and it’s breaking some rules of what we’re doing. It’s very concentrated, where with European projects we are very scattered and distributed.”

Like Boeing (BA+1.46%), whose CST-100 Starliner capsule mission failed and left its astronauts to be brought back from the International Space Station by a SpaceX vessel, Airbus is struggling to keep up with the Elon Musk-founded company in the space business. After Airbus announced in June that it would take nearly $1 billion in charges linked to its space-and-defense division (in part because of a SpaceX-shaped “disruptive new player” in the sector), the department announced the layoff of 2,500 workers last month.

Though Faury also suggested that SpaceX would run afoul of European antitrust regulations—describing it as “a super-concentrated model that actually in Europe we are not allowed to think of”—he also thinks that a little M&A on his side of the pond wouldn’t hurt. “There is room to find more ways of cooperating in Europe to create scale,” he said in September.

In Germany, Faury specifically said that the (legally required) urge to split space work among countries involved in the pan-European venture Ariane makes it harder to build that scale.

“In Europe, we tend to do the…opposite,” he said. “[Airbus makes] 20%, we buy 80%. And by buying 80%, you have a large supply base which is pleasing everybody. Well, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is not pleasing anybody except Elon Musk.”