Europe's hypersonic startups cannot close the missile gap with Russia and China—but they still matter
A German startup just flew a vehicle at Mach 6. Russia and China have deployed operational hypersonic arsenals. Europe's attempt to close a generational missile gap with venture capital and fragmented procurement faces brutal constraints of physics, finance, and time.
Faster Than Strategy
On February 3, 2026, a small rocket punched through the atmosphere over a European test range, accelerated past Mach 6, and covered 300 kilometres before splashing down. The vehicle belonged to Hypersonica, a German-British startup barely two years old. Days later, the company announced a €23.3 million Series A round—enough to keep a few dozen engineers busy, and roughly what MBDA spends in a quarter on paperclips and PowerPoints. The test was real. The gap it purports to close is not measured in kilometres.
Russia fields three operational hypersonic systems: the Avangard glide vehicle, the air-launched Kinzhal, and the ship-borne Zircon. China deploys the DF-ZF atop DF-17 medium-range ballistic missiles and is testing the longer-range DF-27. Europe has nothing. No offensive hypersonic weapon. No indigenous interceptor capable of engaging one. Its missile defence, in the words of NATO’s Joint Air Power Competence Centre, relies on “weapon systems that were not designed to search, track, identify, or engage” hypersonic threats. A handful of startups and a patchwork of government programmes now promise to change this. The question hanging over Europe’s defence establishment is not whether the ambition is admirable. It is whether the ambition is sane.
Twenty-Three Million Against the Tide
The startup theory of hypersonics runs like this: lean companies iterate faster than defence primes, attract engineers who would rather build than bid, and compress timelines that traditional procurement stretches to absurdity. Hypersonica claims it can deliver a strike weapon by 2029. Destinus, founded by Russian émigré Mikhail Kokorich, is developing cruise missiles, loitering munitions, and kinetic interceptors from a dual-use aviation platform. Polaris Spaceplanes in Bremen won a Bundeswehr contract for a reusable hypersonic test vehicle. Each company embodies a wager: that Silicon Valley methods can beat Eurofighter-era bureaucracy to the finish line.
The wager has a problem of proportion. Hypersonica’s €23.3 million competes in a domain where MBDA’s HYDIS2 interceptor programme alone commands roughly €140 million. The European Defence Fund’s 2026 work programme allocates €168 million for hypersonic defence and €68 million for a classified glide-vehicle demonstrator—sums that dwarf any startup round yet remain modest against the tens of billions that the United States and China have poured into their programmes over two decades. In America, venture-backed defence startups received less than one per cent of $411 billion in Department of Defence contracts. The venture model does not scale into weapons procurement. It never has.
This is not because startups lack ingenuity. It is because hypersonic weapons are not software. A glide vehicle re-entering the atmosphere at Mach 6 generates surface temperatures exceeding 2,000°C. The thermal protection system—typically ceramic matrix composites of carbon fibre in a silicon carbide matrix—requires manufacturing processes that take years to qualify and cannot be iterated in six-week sprints. Guidance systems must function inside a plasma sheath that blocks most radio-frequency communication. Scramjet engines, needed for air-breathing cruise missiles, have never been made to work reliably for sustained flight by anyone, including the Americans, whose ARRW programme was cancelled after repeated test failures. As the Congressional Research Service has noted, missile development programmes typically take about ten years. That benchmark applies to organisations with unlimited budgets and decades of institutional knowledge. Startups begin further back.
The deeper obstacle is certification. A missile is not a minimum viable product. It must work the first time, in conditions that cannot be fully simulated, against a target that is trying to kill you. No European startup has a production line, a supply chain for controlled materials, or a relationship with a military customer sophisticated enough to write the requirements document, let alone accept delivery. Hypersonica’s Mach 6 test is a genuine technical achievement. Between that achievement and a weapon that a German or French brigade commander can fire in anger lies a valley wider than any Series A can bridge.
The Primes and Their Timelines
If startups cannot close the gap alone, the question falls to Europe’s incumbent defence industry. Here the picture is not more encouraging—merely more expensive.
France’s ASN4G programme, the nuclear-capable successor to the ASMP-A cruise missile, aims for an operational hypersonic air-to-surface weapon by 2035. MBDA’s HYDIS2, Europe’s flagship interceptor programme, targets a similar date. These are not startup fantasies; they are the considered timelines of organisations that have built missiles before. They are also a decade away. Russia deployed Avangard in 2019. China fielded the DF-17 in 2020. By 2035, Moscow and Beijing will have spent fifteen additional years refining production, doctrine, and operational experience. Europe would arrive at the party as the hosts are redecorating.
The timeline problem compounds. America’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon programme, backed by billions and the full resources of Lockheed Martin, missed multiple deadlines before achieving initial operational capability. If the richest military in history struggles with schedule, Europe—splitting budgets across 27 member states, coordinating through the EDF, OCCAR, and national agencies with overlapping mandates—faces structural friction that no programme manager can eliminate. The IISS assessed in 2025 that exo-atmospheric mid-course interception capabilities in Europe “are provided solely by the United States.” That dependency is not a gap. It is an architecture.
One historical parallel is instructive. The collapse of the ELSA programme—an earlier attempt at a European standoff missile—triggered a cascade of national projects, each too small to achieve economies of scale, each too sovereign to be merged. The EU’s defence-industrial base resembles a continent of artisan workshops producing bespoke muskets while the adversary runs ammunition factories. Consolidation is the obvious answer. Consolidation is also politically impossible in a bloc where defence procurement remains a jealously guarded instrument of national industrial policy.
The Irrelevance Clock
And then there is the second half of the strategic equation: the possibility that hypersonic weapons become less decisive before Europe fields them. This is not wishful thinking. It is a race within a race.
Directed-energy weapons—high-powered lasers and microwave systems—are advancing from laboratory demonstrations toward deployable prototypes. The US Navy’s HELIOS system has been tested at sea. Solid-state lasers offer, in theory, an infinite magazine at near-zero marginal cost per shot, which inverts the economics of hypersonic strike: an attacker spends tens of millions per missile while the defender spends kilowatt-hours. If laser systems reach sufficient power and beam quality to engage manoeuvring targets at relevant ranges within the next decade, the operational premium of hypersonic speed diminishes sharply.
AI-driven sensor networks represent a parallel threat to hypersonic relevance. Hypersonic weapons derive much of their value from compressing the defender’s decision timeline. A glide vehicle travelling at Mach 8 gives ground-based defences perhaps 90 seconds of warning after detection. But detection is the bottleneck, not interception physics. Space-based infrared tracking, distributed ground sensors fused by machine-learning algorithms, and predictive trajectory modelling could expand the warning window enough to restore the defender’s ability to react. NATO’s current integrated air and missile defence exercises already prioritise sensor fusion across national boundaries, though execution remains uneven.
Neither directed energy nor AI sensing will make hypersonics irrelevant overnight. Physics constrains lasers: atmospheric absorption, beam jitter, dwell time on target. Sensor fusion requires interoperability that European militaries have talked about for decades and achieved in fragments. But the trajectory is clear. The window in which hypersonic strike confers decisive advantage is not permanent. It is a decade, perhaps two. Europe is trying to enter through that window just as it begins to close.
The cruellest irony: Russia’s Kinzhal, the weapon that most frightened Western analysts when it was first used against Ukraine in 2022, has since been intercepted by Patriot batteries that were never designed for the task. The gap between hypersonic hype and hypersonic performance in combat is not trivial. A weapon that flies at Mach 10 but follows a semi-ballistic trajectory—as Kinzhal does—is less revolutionary than a weapon that manoeuvres unpredictably at Mach 6. The distinction matters enormously for engineering priorities, and Europe has barely begun to make it.
What Europe Actually Needs
Strip away the startup press releases and the prime contractor roadmaps, and a starker strategic picture emerges. Europe does not need to match Russia and China missile for missile. It needs to answer a different question: what military problem does a European hypersonic weapon solve that cannot be solved by other means?
For France, the answer is nuclear deterrence. The ASN4G will carry a nuclear warhead, and its purpose is to ensure that a French president can deliver a strategic strike against a peer adversary whose air defences have improved. This is a narrow, well-defined requirement. It justifies a national programme with a long timeline and an enormous budget. It does not, however, address the conventional threat that keeps Polish, Estonian, and Finnish defence planners awake.
For NATO’s eastern flank, the requirement is defensive. Frontline states need the ability to detect and intercept Russian hypersonic systems—principally Kinzhal and Zircon—launched from Kaliningrad, the Black Sea, or the Kola Peninsula. This is a sensor-and-interceptor problem, not a strike problem. The EU White Paper for European Defence Readiness 2030 identifies hypersonic technologies as “critical and foundational,” but the political energy behind European hypersonic development conflates two distinct needs: the prestige of possessing offensive strike and the urgency of defending against it.
If Europe’s finite defence euros must choose, defence should win. And defence against hypersonics does not require building your own hypersonic weapons any more than building a fire extinguisher requires first learning arson. Europe should invest massively in space-based tracking, in the sensor backbone that makes interception possible, and in next-generation interceptors like HYDIS2. It should fund startups—not to build missiles but to develop the thermal-protection materials, the guidance algorithms, and the propulsion components that feed into larger programmes. Hypersonica’s ceramic-matrix-composite expertise, for instance, has value independent of whether the company ever delivers a weapon.
This approach carries costs. It means accepting continued dependence on American offensive capability—the very dependency that European strategic autonomy was supposed to end. It means telling national parliaments that Europe will not have its own hypersonic missile on a truck by 2030, or 2035, or possibly ever. And it means trusting that the alliance holds, which in the current political climate requires a confidence that facts do not entirely support.
The alternative—pursuing simultaneous offensive and defensive hypersonic programmes across multiple national and EU channels, funded by venture capital, the EDF, and twenty-seven national budgets, coordinated by no single authority—is the path Europe is currently on. It is a path defined not by strategy but by the absence of it.
The Startup’s Real Role
Where does this leave Hypersonica, Destinus, and their peers? Not where their investors hope.
The venture-capital model works when a company can capture value by shipping a product to many customers. Defence startups operate in monopsony markets where one buyer—the state—sets the price, the timeline, and the specification. VC funds expect returns within seven to ten years. Weapons programmes run for fifteen to twenty. The incentive structures collide. European defence-tech investors who understand this are betting not on product revenue but on acquisition: that a prime contractor will buy the startup for its technology or its engineers. This is a rational bet. It is also an admission that the startup is a component supplier, not a systems integrator.
Export controls tighten the vice. The Missile Technology Control Regime restricts the transfer of complete missile systems exceeding 300 kilometres range and 500 kilograms payload—precisely the category that any operationally useful hypersonic strike weapon occupies. ITAR regulations exclude European companies from US hypersonic technology. European startups thus develop in a box: unable to import American know-how, unable to export finished systems to most potential customers, and dependent on European government contracts that arrive slowly and pay modestly.
ESG constraints add a further complication. Several major European institutional investors—pension funds, sovereign wealth vehicles, insurance companies—operate under sustainability taxonomies that restrict or prohibit investment in weapons systems. This pushes hypersonic ventures toward Gulf and Asian family offices, creating opaque funding channels that sit uneasily with European transparency norms. The financial architecture of European hypersonic development is being shaped as much by ESG compliance officers in Amsterdam as by engineers in Munich.
None of this means startups are useless. They serve as talent attractors, pulling engineers from academic research into applied work. They accelerate component development at technology readiness levels where government funding is scarce. They inject competitive pressure into an industry that has grown comfortable with cost-plus contracts and decade-long schedules. But they will not close the missile gap. That is not a startup’s job. It never was.
FAQ: Key Questions Answered
Q: Does Europe have any operational hypersonic weapons? A: No. As of early 2026, Europe has no deployed offensive or defensive hypersonic systems. France’s ASN4G nuclear cruise missile and MBDA’s HYDIS2 interceptor are the most advanced programmes, both targeting initial capability around 2035.
Q: Can hypersonic missiles be intercepted? A: Yes, with caveats. Ukraine’s forces have intercepted Russia’s Kinzhal using Patriot batteries, though the Kinzhal follows a semi-ballistic trajectory that makes it more predictable than true manoeuvring glide vehicles. No current European system is designed to intercept hypersonic threats reliably.
Q: How fast are hypersonic weapons? A: Hypersonic weapons travel at Mach 5 or above—roughly 6,000 km/h. The fastest deployed systems, like Russia’s Avangard glide vehicle, claim speeds exceeding Mach 20 during the glide phase, though sustained manoeuvring at those speeds remains technically demanding.
Q: Why can’t Europe just buy American hypersonic weapons? A: ITAR export restrictions and US classification policies severely limit technology sharing on hypersonic systems, even with close allies. America’s own programmes have experienced significant delays and cost overruns, leaving limited surplus capacity for allied procurement.
A Continental Tempo
Europe’s hypersonic ambitions are hostage to a mismatch between three clocks. Startups operate on venture time: eighteen-month funding rounds, rapid iteration, impatient boards. Governments operate on procurement time: five-to-ten-year budget cycles, milestone reviews, political turnover. And adversaries operate on strategic time: Russia and China began their programmes in the early 2000s, accepted failures, absorbed lessons, and deployed systems after roughly two decades of sustained effort. No European institution synchronises these rhythms. No mechanism exists to do so.
The continent will not close the missile gap by 2030. It will not close it by 2035. What it can do—if it chooses with unusual clarity—is build the industrial foundation and sensor architecture that makes hypersonic defence credible within a decade, while contributing component technologies that feed into allied offensive programmes over a longer horizon. That is not a stirring vision for a press release. It is what physics, finance, and European politics actually permit. The startups will play their part. But a €23 million Series A, however impressive the flight test, does not outrun a generation of strategic neglect. Europe’s deficit is not in engineering talent or entrepreneurial ambition. It is in the willingness to decide what it is actually building, and for whom.
Sources & Further Reading
The analysis in this article draws on research and reporting from:
- CRS Report R45811: Hypersonic Weapons - Foundational reference on global hypersonic programmes, timelines, and technical challenges
- Defense News: German startup aims to deliver European hypersonic strike by 2029 - Coverage of Hypersonica’s test flight and Series A funding
- EDF 2026 Annual Work Programme - EU defence R&D funding allocations for hypersonic systems
- IISS Strategic Dossier: European Integrated Air and Missile Defence - Assessment of NATO and European missile defence capabilities and gaps
- EU White Paper for European Defence Readiness 2030 - Political mandate for European defence sovereignty and critical technologies
- SIPRI: Hypersonic Boost-glide Systems and the MTCR - Export control implications for hypersonic weapon proliferation
- Euro-SD: Countering the Hypersonic Threat - European perspectives on hypersonic defence architectures
- Kyiv Post: Kinzhal Missile Performance Analysis - Combat performance assessment of Russia’s air-launched hypersonic system
- CBO: U.S. Hypersonic Weapons and Alternatives - Cost and capability analysis of American hypersonic programmes
