This is a chance for Europe. It should be something like the US in the 60's. The USSR launches sputnik - what do you do?
I'm not saying it's a government program. Maybe it's some genus idea that encourages the private sector. Maybe it is a government program. Honestly, who cares.
What it shouldn't be and probably can't be is trundle along the status quo. Doing that is worse for everyone. Even deciding that space flight isn't worth the effort; that's there's no future in it and Europe would be better off doing something else - even that would be better for everyone then what they're doing now.
What they're doing now is more and more just a political program that makes people happy as main goal, sends a few rockets into space as a secondary goal and sets fire to a large number of Euros as a consequence.
Well here is what the US richest are doing with their time and money.
Jeff Bezos, $183 billion: Blue Origin with a smaller side of Amazon. He's going to spend his fortune on space and giving it away.
Elon Musk, $173 billion: bound up in pursuing SpaceX, Mars, Tesla / electric vehicles, batteries, sustainable energy.
Gates & Buffett, $235 billion: giving it all away, saving millions of lives around the world. These two will give away $300+ billion ultimately, most of it going to people outside of the US.
Zuckerberg, $111 billion: Facebook at present, and supposedly going to give it all away (he's young, so we'll see what he does yet).
What are Europe's richest doing?
Bernard Arnault, $124 billion: probably just going to keep the dynastic wealth going based on what he hasn't been doing (he's 72 and clearly not acting to give it all away). Stagnant, dead money, entrenched generational wealth intent on never going away.
Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, $72 billion: she's what the next generation of dynastic squatters from the Arnault clan will look like. Just keep passing it down, doing absolutely nothing interesting or of importance, exactly like her mother before her.
Amancio Ortega, $67 billion: another dynastic passer-downer. It appears he's intent on just giving it to the next generation rather than doing something interesting with it or giving it away.
Francois Pinault, $42 billion: mini Arnault, rinse & repeat.
Fashion and cosmetics. That's one core of Europe's obvious problems. The other elite rich in Europe present the same problem, such as the Wertheimers in France. None of these people have the minds or inclination to build rocket companies or anything similar. It's entirely counter to European culture to take your fortune and risk it doing something 'crazy' like a SpaceX or Tesla.
And those fortunes are far larger within their respective economies than the huge fortunes in the US are vs its economy (scaled to the US, Arnault would have a trillion dollars). So they'll be even more of a rotting drag on the future there. Spain will probably be choking on Ortegas for hundreds of years.
This is the last several hundred year story of European wealth, repeating endlessly. Western Europe, among all major wealth regions on the planet, is the absolute worst when it comes to endlessly passing down dynastic wealth.
The US has its own prominent examples of recent epic dynastic wealth, as with the second generation of the Waltons or the Mars family. The US also has very large offsets that don't do that whereas Europe has none.
I'm not saying it's a government program. Maybe it's some genus idea that encourages the private sector. Maybe it is a government program. Honestly, who cares.
What it shouldn't be and probably can't be is trundle along the status quo. Doing that is worse for everyone. Even deciding that space flight isn't worth the effort; that's there's no future in it and Europe would be better off doing something else - even that would be better for everyone then what they're doing now.
What they're doing now is more and more just a political program that makes people happy as main goal, sends a few rockets into space as a secondary goal and sets fire to a large number of Euros as a consequence.