Accelerating time to orbit with European innovation

The retirement of the Ariane 5 and technical setbacks for its successors have left Europe in a vulnerable "launch gap," forcing a reliance on SpaceX that undermines the continent’s strategic autonomy. This urgency is compounded by the loss of Russian Soyuz access and the reality of space as a contested battlespace. For Europe to reassert sovereign access to orbit, Europe needs sovereign propulsion systems. That means engines built, tested, and qualified in Europe, free of ITAR components and foreign supply-chain dependencies.

These new circumstances have driven a massive policy shift that saw EU defense spending reach €326 billion and space investment hit €16 billion in 2024. To end Europe’s dependence on mercurial foreign policy and foreign hardware, a new wave of European "NewSpace" companies are racing to build the next generation of space systems to get Europe back to orbit. One of these companies is The Exploration Company (TEC), who has already started development on at least two sovereign European propulsion systems.

• Mistral is a ~200N green hypergolic thruster running on hydrogen peroxide, built for attitude control and in-space maneuvering on TEC’s reentry capsule Nyx and future in-orbit servicing missions. ‍
• Huracan is Europe's first electric-pump-fed cryogenic rocket engine: 15 kN of vacuum thrust, throttleable down to 33%, running on liquid oxygen and methane. It's the primary engine for TEC's Hilal lunar lander, targeting a 2030 Moon landing.

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Fragmented data sources impeded progress

TEC's propulsion roadmap runs at an ambitious pace. For Mistral, TEC has already tested six different thruster configurations, gathering combustion stability and thermal performance data across burns of up to 28 seconds. For Huracan, TEC has completed four Thrust Chamber Assembly campaigns, a first pumps test campaign, a fully integrated engine test campaign, with another test campaign scheduled for early 2027. Every one of those tests produces high-rate telemetry across dozens of sensors that engineers need to align, compare against prior runs, and feed back into the next design iteration.

Before Sift, that work sat across a fragmented set of tools. Analysis relied on custom scripts and Jupyter workflows, sometimes duplicated across teams, that slowed the turn between tests and made it harder to catch drift or trend anomalies early. As test complexity and export-control requirements grew, so did the risk that a quality-critical signal would be missed.

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To move faster, TEC turned to Sift

TEC recognized an opportunity to upgrade this workflow to improve engineering velocity and accelerate the company's propulsion roadmap. To take Mistral and Huracan from the test stand to flight, TEC partnered with Sift.

Now after every test, TEC engineers use Sift to rapidly assess results and decide what to adjust for the next run. They pull key sensor metrics (averages, minima, maxima, standard deviations) directly from the platform and build calculated channels by combining raw sensor data into higher-order signals. All without custom scripts.

Sift's rules engine automatically identifies steady-state operation in the test data, saving hours of manual analysis per campaign. For Huracan, where tests ran in the UK and with the engineering team in Germany, both sites access the same data and share visualization snapshots through Sift's cloud platform. This keeps the program aligned regardless of test stand location. All of TEC's test data can now live in one place – whether it’s telemetry, video, metadata, or attachments. With Sift, TEC’s engineers spend less time moving files and more time iterating on the system.

Enabling cross controls for collaboration

Propulsion test data is among the most export-controlled data a space company produces, and TEC's programs cross multiple jurisdictions. Huracan is tested in the UK and engineered out of Germany and France. TEC's teams sit across France, Germany, Italy, the US, and the UAE. That makes sovereignty, access control, and residency requirements non-negotiable, not nice-to-haves.

To support this, Sift deployed to the AWS Paris region so TEC's data never leaves France. This deployment model directly supports compliance with French and EU export control regimes, including Regulation 2021/821 and France's MA3. Should stricter hosting requirements arise, Sift's infrastructure flexibility supports migration to more tightly controlled deployment options. On top of that, Sift's attribute-based access controls, being co-developed in active partnership with TEC, give the team fine-grained control over who can see which test data based on export-control clearances and team membership. Sift’s capabilities, combined with our prior experience in spacecraft and propulsion test operations, makes Sift the natural choice for TEC as the standard platform for propulsion testing across every site.

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World-class hardware deserves world-class software

TEC's ambitions are historic. Mistral and Huracan anchor a propulsion portfolio that will rebuild Europe’s sovereign launch capability at a crucial moment. Now is the time to choose a partner who’s already delivered for the world’s most demanding spacecraft teams. TEC has chosen Sift to realize a €10 billion+ market opportunity. 

Our partnership ensures a fully scalable, integrated telemetry backbone with secure collaboration controls. So whether TEC engineers are at a test stand in the UK, in their offices in Bordeaux, Munich, or Turin, or at their demonstration site near Dubai, or beyond, the data they need are at their fingertips through Sift. 

Sift is proud to support TEC’s vision as they lead Europe’s charge back to the stars. Are you a team in Europe building a next-generation machine? We'd love to hear from you.