In a ceremony during the European Space Conference in Brussels Jan. 23, ESA and European Commission officials announced the launch companies that will participate in the European Flight Ticket Initiative. The effort, announced last fall, is intended to stimulate demand for European launch services by allowing them to compete for missions in the EU’s In-Orbit Demonstration and Validation technology program.

Each of the companies will receive a “frame” contract as part of the initiative, allowing them to compete for task orders for launching specific missions. Officials did not disclose the anticipated value of those contracts, or how many launch companies competed to participate in the program.

Four of the companies selected for the Flight Ticket Initiative are startups working on small launch vehicles: Isar Aerospace, Orbex, PLD Space and Rocket Factory Augsburg. None of them have yet conducted an orbital launch but expect to do so within the next two years.

The fifth company was Arianespace, which will offer rideshare launches on its Vega C and Ariane 6 rockets. “We see the importance of smaller satellites, the impact and the power that these new innovations can bring,” said Steven Rutgers, chief commercial officer of Arianespace.

Launch vehicle development in Europe has traditionally been the domain of ESA and national governments, but in a separate talk at the conference shortly after Breton, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher acknowledged a larger role for the EU in the future.

“The next generation of launchers will be developed in a very different way by European industry with ESA as an anchor customer,” he said, an approach that will more closely follow the services approach used in the United States. That work, he said, will be done “in close cooperation with the member states, together with the European Union and other European institutional users as potential customers.”