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EU to help Ukraine replace Musk’s Starlink
(www.politico.eu)
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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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There's pretty much no way any rocket engineer will get the same salary in the EU.
American professionals will always get more money because there is hardly any wealth distribution and social safety nets are nonexistent. Just to illustrate it: the top 10% of Americans have the same gross income as the top 1% of Europeans in wealthy nations (UK, Sweden, Germany...). This is before tax by the way, so the difference is even greater in practice. EU VAT is a further 20% and more safety regulations cause prices to be generally higher, especially for homes.
Any engineer at SpaceX will definitely live a better life by staying in the US. They'd have to want to live in a social democracy over a fascist oligarchy.
You can use this calculator for Germany to get the need weighted income:
https://www.iwkoeln.de/fileadmin/user_upload/HTML/2022/Einkommensrechner/index.html
First line: monthly income after tax Second line: persons >14 years in household Third line: persons <14 years in household
For a single person:
For a household with two parents and two children below 14 years:
Worker's rights may be the biggest factor. Regulations are fairly strict here with a minimum of 4 weeks of paid yearly holidays, 6 weeks of fully paid sick leave (after which your gross income is reduced to 70% for 72 weeks [after which your net income is reduced to 60% for up to 12/24 months after which it gets complicated beyond the scope of this comment]) which you can also take during your holidays by the way. You cannot get fired without the company being proven to struggle financially or you performing significantly worse than your contract requires and it is the last resort and all other actions (training, reassignment, salary reduction) have failed. Also, the older you are or the longer you've worked for a company the more difficult or even outright impossible it becomes to fire you or reduce your salary because finding a job at ages shortly before retirement is difficult.
Switzerland has absurdly high salaries but isn't in the EU. They have absurdly high prices as well though. However, I don't think Switzerland has much, if any, interest in rockets. Most of their money comes not from engineering but rather from luxury goods and banking (i.e. hiding absurdly wealthy people's money).
Monaco exists in the EU as well but it's more of a multimillionaire to billionaire hangout with no industries.
But there is no way any EU rocket company will pay salaries comparable to the US. It's unaffordable for nations with social safety nets to pay insane salaries. Maybe they'd get a low six figure income in wealthier EU nations but certainly not 200k.
That might be true for the American professional class as a whole, but Europe could still outbid the USA in industries it decides to focus on.
If for example the EU wanted to headhunt Spacex engineers, it could easily offer every one a bigger salary. Spacex's budget is still significantly smaller than the ESA's.
Not that the EU is likely to try that tactic in particular, although spending more money on space seems possible as part of avoiding reliance on the Americans.