After more than a decade in Theoretical Physics, I left academia to build a space technology company developing high-precision optical sensing for Space Situational Awareness. The transition revealed something unexpected: Europe does not lack intelligence, capital, or institutions — it faces a structural misallocation of talent. Many publicly trained scientists end up in finance and consulting; many “space” startups focus on downstream layers rather than creating new technologies; and government systems optimize for risk minimization. This creates a vacuum: the development of deep, first-principles, infrastructure-building space technology. Europe must — and can — strengthen its strategic autonomy in space by building its own measurement capabilities. This talk explores the journey to answer this need: how to better align scientific excellence with industrial and Defence needs, illustrated through the case of building Dunedain Space in NL as an experiment in bringing these different groups together.