> So what are we missing?

There are some (many?) European companies which are considered as least as much as a jobs program as anything else.

In 2018, Alain Charmeau (in)famously expressed frustration with SpaceX in an interview with Der Spiegel and rejected reusability with these words:

“Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year,” he said. “That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: ‘Goodbye, see you next year!’”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...

from the original

https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-d...

A more recent example would be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project which was officially cancelled in June 2026, due to (?) industrial rivalry and leadership disputes, with a side order of politics.