BREMEN – Forget a moon mission or ever-sharper imagery of receding glaciers, getting a continent at war to spend more on space these days means turning the conversation to defence.
Rather than skirt references to military matters, ministers from the European Space Agency’s 23 member capitals will lean heavily into the need to protect orbital assets and deploy satellite-reconnaissance systems to ward off threats on Earth at a pledging summit in Bremen through Wednesday and Thursday.
Civilian science and observation projects will still make up the lion’s share of the €22 billion that ESA aims to raise through at least 2028, but the flood of more national military spending offers opportunities.
“Defence budgets across Europe are expanding,” ESA’s Director General Josef Aschbacher said last month as he put the finishing touches to the budget draft to be finalised in the German city state. “Yet, overall space-related defence allocations remain modest in Europe.”
Even as capitals are zooming towards NATO’s 5% of GDP defence target, ESA estimates governments spend just 0.07% of GDP on space.
That is beginning to shift. Germany, which recently overtook France as ESA’s largest funder, has outlined a €35 billion space-defence plan; even Canada, curiously a member of ESA since 1979, is upping its contribution in Bremen.
In a breakthrough move, this time around ESA will seek €1 billion for preliminary work on a new reconnaissance satellite network, dubbed European Resilience from Space, to be funded jointly with the European Commission.
Because the agency’s model incentivises contributions – countries get back contracts equivalent to what they pay under the so-called “geo-return” system – the real play is getting aerospace majors to lobby their own governments.
“Space companies are increasingly pivoting towards defence-oriented solutions and applications, while European defence firms are actively integrating space capabilities,” Aschbacher said in Brussels last month.
Those kinds of comments ahead of a budget meeting would have been unthinkable last time ESA convened ministers in Paris three years ago.
“Until the ESA council meeting in 2022, climate was the dominant theme,” Ludwig Moeller, director of the Vienna-based European Space Policy Institute, wrote this week. “Since then, security and defence have moved to the forefront, driven initially by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
Since the 1970s, ESA has led on science programmes, teaming up with NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos on new exploration initiatives, while also acting as the procurement arm for EU satellite projects. ESA also trains Europe’s astronaut corps at a facility outside Cologne.
But Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine prompted a discussion among member countries over whether to break the taboos around dealing with defence, given the agency’s 1975 founding convention commits it to “strengthen European cooperation” but, critically, only “for exclusively peaceful purposes.”
The result of the conversation leading up to Bremen, Aschbacher told Euractiv last month, is that defence is no longer a “forbidden” topic.
(aw, cz)