Two European space companies have booked dedicated Starship missions that would use SpaceX's Starfall capsule to carry cargo back to Earth, a sign that commercial demand for return-to-Earth services is starting to take shape. Space Cargo Unlimited, based in Luxembourg, announced a 2028 mission on September 15, while Exolaunch, based in Germany, announced a 2029 booking on September 21.
Starfall is an uncrewed, disk-shaped reentry capsule. It made its first flight on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on June 23, 2026, and splashed down in the Pacific, where a ship recovered it after the demonstration. The capsule can carry about 1,000 kilograms of cargo, and its empty mass is roughly 2,100 kilograms. The design is meant to let payloads survive reentry and be recovered intact, something few vehicles currently offer at this scale.
Space Cargo Unlimited plans to use its booking to support a one-tonne in-space factory built on its BentoBox platform. The company says it has more than 100 prospective customers, with about 40 percent of them in the life sciences. Its plan rests on being able to return manufactured products or research results to Earth after they are made in orbit.
Exolaunch intends to gather payloads from the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and materials sectors and fly them home together on its Starfall mission. Aggregating smaller customers onto a single flight is a common way for launch and logistics firms to make access to orbit or return services affordable.
Both bookings carry important caveats. The dates are not official SpaceX manifest commitments, and both missions depend on Starship reaching regular commercial operations, which has not yet happened. Exolaunch is also in the process of being acquired by the private equity firm EQT, a transaction that could affect its plans. For now, the reservations signal interest from European companies in a return-cargo service that remains unproven at scale.
We rewrote this story on 4 November 2026 after an editorial review.
Credit. Based on reporting by Chris Bergin for NASASpaceflight. Is this your work? Write to us.
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