Two founder journeys through EU institutional funding: D-Orbit and DCUBED

Why these two stories

EU Space Academy, EUSPA's free e-learning platform, runs a series of recorded conversations with European New Space founders as part of its "Understanding the Space Economy" course. Most funding narratives about space startups skip straight from "founded" to "raised" to "flying" — the rejection letters and the years of unpaid work get edited out. Rossettini and Sinn don't edit them out. Both volunteer the ugly middle of their companies' histories, and both arrive at roughly the same conclusion from very different starting points: institutional money in Europe is slow, occasionally humiliating to ask for, and worth it if you can survive long enough to collect.

Luca Rossettini and D-Orbit: from "go back to school" to a €2.5 million ESA contract

Rossettini didn't set out to be a space entrepreneur — he set out to be an astronaut, went through Europe's astronaut selection process around 2008–2009, and didn't make it. What he had left afterward was a stack of credentials: a master's in space engineering, a PhD in advanced space propulsion, further master's degrees in robotics, software and strategic sustainability, a business certificate from Silicon Valley, and a stint as a parachute officer in the Italian army. Before D-Orbit, he had already co-founded two for-profit companies — one offering drone-based industrial services "when drones were not cool," the other producing slow-motion and time-lapse visual effects for film, with work that reached the Oscars on a small project, though it didn't win — plus a non-profit, the Italian chapter of The Natural Step, helping large corporations make sustainability profitable. That last venture is where he picked up the circular-economy framework he later built D-Orbit around.

The formative rejection came in 2010, at the Rice Business Plan Competition in Houston — one of the largest student startup competitions in the world. Rossettini and a co-founder pitched an early version of what the industry now calls active debris removal: capturing a satellite, extending its life, and eventually removing it from orbit. They were the only space project among the finalists, and NASA happened to be in the room. According to Rossettini, the panel's response was blunt: "We don't have questions, but we have comments. Why don't you go back to school and start studying again, but start from the high school."

The company was formally established at the end of 2011 or start of 2012, and one of its first moves was to submit an unsolicited proposal to ESA for the same concept — code-named "Corridoras," after a fish known for cleaning up aquariums. With no budget for polished graphics, the pitch deck borrowed imagery from Star Wars. ESA's answer was a rejection letter. Rossettini says he still keeps it framed in his office.

Money was the other early wall. D-Orbit went looking for a €5 million seed round, reasoning that a NASA-adjacent, Silicon-Valley-certified, Rice-finalist pedigree would make fundraising straightforward. It didn't. Raising anything took about a year and produced exactly one offer: €300,000 for 44% of the company, take it or leave it, with a mechanism to earn back equity by hitting milestones. They took it — the only offer on the table — and for years afterward the company struggled to make payroll at all. Rossettini was the only full-time employee, unpaid, for years.

Seven years after the "Corridoras" rejection letter, in 2018, D-Orbit won a €2.5 million ESA contract for the same underlying concept. Rossettini's own read on the gap in between is that he made a mistake by walking away from that first rejection convinced he'd never work with institutions again. He later changed his framing: institutions, in his words, aren't quite customers in the normal sense — "I consider them more as... encore customers" that hand a startup traction it can then sell into the commercial market. Working with them, he argues, means learning a different language than investors or commercial buyers speak, because the incentives on the other side of the table are lopsided: "Public servants, basically they are like the goalkeepers... if they stop the ball, they are just doing their job, no incentives. But if the ball is scoring, then they are the bad guys." Trust, in that environment, takes years to build precisely because the downside for a public servant who backs the wrong startup is much larger than the upside for backing the right one.

D-Orbit today runs three lines of business — last-mile satellite deployment (which Rossettini says saves customers up to 85% of the time and 40% of the cost of reaching revenue, versus deploying straight from the launcher), in-orbit technology validation for other startups (more than 50 payloads tested), and in-orbit servicing such as life extension, relocation and eventual decommissioning — organized around a longer-term vision of space logistics, space cloud computing and cybersecurity, tied together by circular-economy principles. Asked what he'd tell other founders about giving up, Rossettini's answer was characteristically blunt: "If you give up, you have 100% probability of failure."

Thomas Sinn and DCUBED: bootstrapped with a 3D printer and a day job

Sinn's route into space was more literal. He grew up in Lampoldshausen, next to the rocket test site for Europe's Ariane launchers, close enough that test firings shook the windows of his house. He studied space engineering in Stuttgart, then went to the US as an exchange student to work on shape-memory alloys and shape-changing structures, and completed a PhD in Scotland on deployable space structures for asteroid deflection and space solar power — motivated, he joked, by the fact that "if the dinosaurs would have had a space programme, they would be still around."

He expected ESA to be where the hands-on hardware work happened, but found the agency's role was mostly oversight — checking and signing off on what industry builds, rather than building it directly — so he moved into industry instead, working on larger deployable structures for an SME in Munich. The opening that led to DCUBED came through contacts from his time at NASA's Kennedy Space Center: a slot on Rocket Lab's first commercial mission. There was no release/separation device available on the market in the timeframe he needed, so he bought a 3D printer, used up his holiday time, and built one himself. Funded step by step through grants and competition wins, that device became DCUBED's first product, and the company was officially founded in 2019.

The founding team's approach to runway was simple: everyone kept their existing full-time jobs at first, so the company could absorb their time without having to pay salaries — "one of the biggest things we spend money is the people," as Sinn puts it, "and if you don't need to do that, you can actually go a long way." Rather than polishing a pitch, the team focused on getting a small, demoable first product into a customer's hands, which won DCUBED a paying customer within a few months of founding. Sinn's view of flight heritage in this industry is unambiguous: "Only if you've been to space, you're also considered for space."

DCUBED now has more than 30 products flown and close to 1,000 units sold of its release actuator — Sinn calls it "the button of the umbrella" — and has moved on to building the "umbrella" itself: deployable solar arrays and antennas that fold small for launch and expand once in orbit. The next step is more ambitious: a scheduled in-orbit demonstration of 3D-printing a solar-array backing structure directly in space, a step toward in-space manufacturing that Sinn believes could cut solar-array costs by roughly two orders of magnitude if it works as hoped, potentially unlocking things like cheaper space-based solar power. Getting there, in his telling, requires the space industry to shed its historical risk-aversion: "It's not rocket science... but if you think of rocket science, it's actually not the most innovative technology. It's the safest technology."

His advice to first-time founders leans on the same instinct that got DCUBED its first customer: "There will not be ever a perfect product" — so ship something, get feedback, and iterate, while staying convinced of the underlying idea even when naysayers show up. On teams, he prefers a sports-team analogy to a family one: everyone has a defined position, everyone is relied on to play it, and — unlike family — a team is something you build on purpose around a shared goal.

D-Orbit and DCUBED at a glance

The pattern underneath both stories

Neither founder describes a fast institutional win. D-Orbit's gap between a rejection letter and a multi-million-euro ESA contract was seven years. DCUBED's gap between a bought-not-built 3D printer and a scheduled in-space manufacturing demonstration spans most of the company's life so far. In both accounts, the bottleneck isn't really the technology — it's whether the company is still around, and still credible, by the time an institution is ready to trust it. Rossettini and Sinn each frame their early setbacks as necessary rather than as evidence they were on the wrong track.

If an early rejection has you discouraged right now

1. Expect the first institutional answer to be no, or silence. Plan your runway around a multi-year relationship with public funders, not a single application cycle.
2. Get something demoable in front of a real customer before you get the perfect product. DCUBED's first paying customer arrived within months of a 3D-printed prototype built on personal savings, not a finished product line.
3. Treat public funders as a distinct kind of customer, not a slower VC. Their incentives are asymmetric — Rossettini's "goalkeeper" framing is worth sitting with before you write your next proposal.
4. If the only offer on the table comes with harsh terms, look for a way to earn better ones back. D-Orbit's 44%-for-€300K deal included a milestone-based mechanism to recover equity — take the deal, but negotiate the recovery path.

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