Jean-François Geneste : "I observe where the future is being forged, and it’s not in Europe"

Joining the former scientific director of EADS to examine the controversy surrounding Airbus’s hydrogen aircraft, emblematic of a European industrial strategy that is both lethargic and undermined.

This the summarized transcript in English of Jean-François Geneste’s interview.

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Can innovation still thrive in the Europe? After over three decades in the aerospace sector, contributing to missiles, satellites, launch vehicles, aircraft, and helicopter technologies, including a decade as scientific director at EADS (now Airbus Group), Jean-François Geneste has lost faith in Europe.

Through his startup Warpa, he is developing projects like a hydrogen-propelled airship and a revolutionary space engine that could make Mars a week’s journey from Earth.

Jean-François Geneste speaks bluntly about European industrial policies. His unvarnished, forthright critique, bound to ruffle feathers, exposes twenty years of strategic errors and the proliferation of expensive, ineffective, or tainted programs (Choose France being a recent example). His insights are informed by two decades as a union representative, giving him an insider’s view of decision-making in European capitals like Paris and Brussels.

Also see his op-ed in L’Eclaireur: The Last Stand of The Manned Combat Aircraft.

Jean-François Geneste has also lectured at the École Normale Supérieure and Moscow’s Skolkovo Institute. He has authored numerous works spanning social sciences, philosophy, industrial strategy, and defense, alongside fictional narratives. Key publications include Physics, the Spirit of Laws, Defense Logic, 30 Ideas, Thus Walked Humanity: A Psycho-Mathematical Perspective on Human and Social Sciences and Management, and, in 2015, The Chinese Slap, a remarkably prescient tale.

L'Eclaireur - I'm joined by Jean-François Geneste, CEO of Warpa, a company focused on developing disruptive industrial projects. These include a hydrogen-powered all-terrain teradrone airship and a space propulsion engine, patented in 2023, that could reduce travel time to Mars from a year to one week.

With experience at Matra and a decade as scientific director at EADS, now Airbus Group, Jean-François Geneste offers a sharp, unfiltered perspective on the industrial policies of France and the European Union. He views them as disorganized, lacking direction, and resulting in the wasteful expenditure of millions, if not billions, of euros with little to show for it. The hydrogen-powered airplane is a prime example, which we’ll discuss today. Jean-François, you were the scientific director at EADS, correct?

Jean-François Geneste - Yes, at EADS, which became Airbus Group around 2012. I served as scientific director from 2008 until late 2017, officially leaving Airbus in mid-2018 due to a paid notice period. During that time, I also taught at Skoltech, the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow. In 2007, when oil prices soared to $150-$160 per barrel, Russia used the windfall to create Skolkovo, a Silicon Valley-like hub, and a university teaching in English under an MIT license. I taught there until the Ukraine conflict led to sanctions, blacklisting Skoltech. American professors faced fines up to €1 million and five years in prison for staying.

My career began at Matra, working on missiles, then space projects, and briefly at Matra Systems and Information, where I tried to launch a startup to combat counterfeiting and theft. I found potential investors in the automotive and luxury sectors, but European officials privately admitted the EU wasn’t interested in fighting counterfeiting. This was around 1998, exposing flawed priorities. For example, German automakers like Daimler supported my ideas but warned of significant challenges. They cited a TV ad showing a car braking at a cliff’s edge to highlight the risks of non-original parts, a concern Airbus shared when asked to maintain parts we never sold, raising safety issues.

I also spent 17 years in the cryptography and complexity research group at École Normale Supérieure in Paris under Jacques Stern. I recently published a book on disruptive cryptography, released online on May 9 this year. Some chapters couldn’t be published in standard journals due to their sensitive nature, despite my connections with leading cryptologists like Jean-Jacques Quisquater, considered one of the 20th century’s best. My work included a chip card without a secret, addressing vulnerabilities where secrets can be cloned. I also proposed new quantum physics approaches, enabling unique communication methods and an analog quantum computer, presented at specialized conferences like Catacrypt, organized by Quisquater to explore disruptive ideas.

L'Eclaireur - Why were your ideas often rejected? Did they challenge established norms too much?

Jean-François Geneste - Yes, they were too unconventional. My chip card without a secret, published in 2002, and my quantum physics modifications were too radical for mainstream journals. At Catacrypt, I presented alongside pioneers like Rivest, Diffie, Hellman, and Quisquater. A Chinese mathematician once exposed flaws in hash functions by finding collisions manually, shaking the field. My talks at conferences in San Francisco, Florence (2016), and Paris (2017) were well-received, but Quisquater warned that mainstream journals wouldn’t accept them. I’ve also written theoretical physics books, a 2012 science fiction novel, The Chinese Slap, predicting Western decline.

L'Eclaireur - You founded Warpa to pursue projects Airbus wouldn’t support. Can you elaborate?

Jean-François Geneste - Warpa aims to develop what Airbus couldn’t or wouldn’t, as they’re too rigid to evolve—like dinosaurs. It’s challenging, as Robert Hossein said, I was born poor with rich ideas. For example, I patented a space propulsion engine in December 2021, granted in 2023, that could reach Mars in a week. I extended the patent to 13 countries outside the EU, including Russia, the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Japan. The costs are steep—€150,000 this year alone, after already spending that much. I haven’t secured funding to start development. I approached the Luxembourg Space Agency, as Luxembourg and the U.S. have laws allowing asteroid mining on a first-come, first-served basis. After 14 months of talks, they agreed to fund me, but the European Space Agency (ESA) rejected it, costing me 16 months. This reflects Europe’s aversion to risky, forward-thinking research. Historically, I faced similar issues in Russia, where an astronaut told me mining asteroids would land you in prison under their interpretation of the 1967 space treaty, unlike the U.S. perspective.

L'Eclaireur - Is there a problem with funding truly innovative, prospective scientific research?

Jean-François Geneste - Yes, Europe is risk-averse. I’ve never seen a program fail for technical reasons at Matra or Airbus, which isn’t normal. We should aim high enough to fail occasionally. Instead, we play it safe, lagging a decade behind with zero risk, ensuring we’ll never lead. A hydrogen expert told you the Chinese accept risks because society trumps the individual, and Americans are willing to fail. In Europe, we’re paralyzed. In Russia, where I taught, the civilian sector is worse—projects must be profitable within a year, or they’re dead. Their military sector, like hypersonic missiles, takes risks, but it’s inaccessible. When I arrived at Skoltech in 2017, I was meant to join the innovation department, but the university president reassigned me to the space department on my first day, as the innovation head was fired. Working under an MIT license, I couldn’t access Russia’s military-dominated space industry or Roscosmos, rendering collaboration impossible.

L'Eclaireur - What about the hydrogen airplane? Is it a fantasy or worth pursuing?

Jean-François Geneste - It’s a scandal. At EADS, we studied three paths to reduce emissions: electric, hydrogen, and biofuels. Biofuels, using processes like Fischer-Tropsch, are feasible but inefficient—photosynthesis yields less than 1%, and cultivating crops competes with food production. Europe lacks the deserts Americans use for algae-based biofuels. Electric propulsion is impractical; an Airbus A320 would need 280 tons of batteries for the energy of 77 tons of fuel and passengers. Nuclear-powered planes were viable but vetoed for non-technical reasons. Hydrogen, used in fuel cells to generate electricity, is too low-density. Storing it at 700 bars means hydrogen is only 5% of the total mass, and liquid hydrogen at -250°C requires materials we don’t have. Hydrogen takes 12 times the volume of kerosene for the same energy, so you’d need four times the aircraft volume. A 2011-2013 Airbus report concluded it was unfeasible. I proposed a liquid methane-powered plane, which operates at -162°C and offers 10% more energy than kerosene with less pollution, but it was rejected by Airbus and Germany’s DLR. The €1.5 billion in Covid-era subsidies for hydrogen planes, tied to Airbus and Universal Hydrogen, founded by Paul Eremenko, who replaced Jean Botti as CTO, is outrageous. Eremenko’s leadership gutted our 800-person innovation unit to 21, mirroring the Alstom affair. No breakthroughs justify revisiting hydrogen; claims of delays to 2040 are face-saving nonsense.

L'Eclaireur - On state aid, subsidies often seem poorly controlled. What’s your view?

Jean-François Geneste - Subsidies go to established players, not the best projects. If I were the state, I’d scrap all R&D subsidies and create a small, opportunistic committee—half young, half experienced—to fund bold, novel ideas without budget limits. Mature companies like Airbus or Renault can handle incremental improvements themselves. The U.S. fosters startups from scratch; we need to do the same to create a European GAFAM. Instead, we fund big names like STMicro, Intel, or GlobalFoundries, as seen with the 2013 Chips Act, where €2.9 billion in aid lacks transparency. European funding requires matching funds, stifling innovation. The system prioritizes who applies, not the project’s merit, demanding consortiums with specific countries, choosing based on names, not ideas.

L'Eclaireur - Reallocating resources, like replacing pilots with automation, faces resistance. Could those resources be redirected, say, to air traffic control?

Jean-François Geneste - Automation could eliminate pilots, improving safety, as most plane crashes involve human error. My Warpad airship project, for which I’m seeking €500 million, will be fully dronized. Airships move slowly, and pilots are costly, so AI can handle navigation and negotiate flight plans with air traffic control. With today’s AI, we might not even need human air traffic controllers—machines could manage traffic directly. Resistance comes from lobbies and fear of job losses, but in the 1970s, we laid off workers en masse without hesitation. Rather than reassigning, we need new industries. AI won’t surpass human intelligence; computers recognize languages, but humans conceive them. If a machine can replace you, the task wasn’t that intelligent. We should focus on what humans do best, like investigative journalism over rote news aggregation, which AI can handle.

L'Eclaireur - You’ve criticized views like Laurent Alexandre’s, calling some “useless.” What’s your take?

Jean-François Geneste - Alexandre’s claim at Polytechnique that there are “god-like” elites and “useless” others is catastrophic. Labeling people useless—whether workers, the unemployed, or the elderly, as seen in euthanasia debates—breeds contempt. Even Macron’s remark about “nobodies” in train stations is unacceptable. We should use AI to relieve people from mundane tasks, like assembly line work, where robots assist but humans remain essential. The competition should be about human value, not just profits, where robots work tirelessly without needs. The West resists this shift, while China focuses on industrialization, though their aging population and vast rural areas keep them focused on growth over human-centric innovation.

L'Eclaireur - What about Europe’s rearmament policy? Is it a slogan or reality?

Jean-François Geneste - There may be financial commitments, but European defense doesn’t exist due to divergent interests, like France and Germany’s differing stances on the Balkans. France should assess its enemies—none currently threaten us militarily. Our priority should be securing our vast maritime territories, like New Caledonia, against economic rivals exploiting our waters. We need to modernize our nuclear deterrent urgently, as Russia’s hypersonic missiles and anti-missile defenses outpace us. In 1940, we were one war behind; in 2025, we’re nearly two. The 2008 defense white paper under Sarkozy misidentified terrorism as the main threat, which doesn’t require military rearmament but policing. We should focus on civil security and maritime resource development, not hypothetical wars. Russia, a historical ally, isn’t a threat—they’re francophiles with a sparse population facing their own challenges.

L'Eclaireur - Europe seems to lack political will, vision, or strategy for reindustrialization.

Jean-François Geneste - Reindustrialization is a fantasy because the ecosystem is gone. In Romans-sur-Isère, once the shoe capital, brands like Charles Jourdan collapsed. Artisans tried to restart, but the supply chain—small parts like eyelets—vanished, forcing reliance on China, killing their ventures. Rebuilding an ecosystem is nearly impossible unless we create a new one for disruptive technologies. Protectionism, like Trump’s, works better for the U.S., but Europe and France lack the resources for autonomy. We can’t revive old industries; we must focus on future ones, but we don’t. Subsidies are scattered ineffectively—Sarkozy’s €35 billion Grand Emprunt, Hollande’s €26 billion, and France 2030’s €100 billion yielded no GAFAM. It’s a disgrace.

L'Eclaireur - On data hosting, Amazon and Microsoft dominate, while French and European players are dismissed as inadequate, despite potential. What’s your take?

Jean-François Geneste - Even if European firms lack the level, they need public contracts to grow. The state built aerospace and nuclear under De Gaulle, but since then, nothing. France’s debt is massive, and we’re stuck in a service-based economy with zero productivity growth, unlike industry’s 7% annual growth. China’s industrial focus ensures growth; our service obsession guarantees stagnation. I attended the Institut des Hautes Études de l’Entreprise, led by BNP Paribas’ Michel Pébereau, with peers like Marisol Touraine and Florence Parly. They pushed a post-industrial service economy, but my research showed industry drives productivity. For data sovereignty, we need ministers like Philippe Latombe, but they’re sidelined. Anyone outside the mainstream is labeled extreme, stifling solutions.

For my space engine, I’ve found no European investors—only interest from the U.S., China, India, and Africa. Europe’s system demands matching funds, which is prohibitive. When I returned from Russia, I proposed a thermo-acoustic engine project developed at Airbus and validated by the ESA. It converts heat to sound to electricity, cutting fuel use by 3.5 times in vehicles. Despite support from the French Army’s Battle Lab, the Defense Innovation Agency rejected it, suggesting I do a PhD at 65! I now seek private funds globally, as Europe lacks vision. Startups here are funded briefly by agencies like the DGA, then forced to sell to giants like Safran or Airbus, where their innovations are stifled. This is why we have no GAFAMs.