Fifty years after the Apollo 11 moon landing, the second stage of the space race is underway — and Europe has to decide whether it wants to be a front-runner.
In November, ministers from across the Continent will meet in Spain to figure out which projects to fund under the umbrella of the European Space Agency, a club of 22 countries that manages exploration, satellites and planning. The decisions to be taken include figuring out whether to fund an asteroid-deflecting project alongside NASA, and how ambitious to be on future exploration missions.
Europe will also have to decide whether it wants to get involved in the growing militarization of space — something that divides EU countries.
The gathering in Seville will set Europe on a trajectory for how it handles space projects through the 2020s. It comes as the EU asks capitals to firm up the bloc’s own space funding program, while other global players such as the U.S., China, Russia, and now India, make their own — not always benign — moves.
“We are now restarting a space race,” said Marco Fuchs, the CEO of Bremen-based aerospace company OHB. “It’s not just a political race between the Soviet Union and United States but it’s a broader race, like when people first landed in the Americas. At first it was the Spanish, Portuguese, British and Dutch … but later on there was a commercial wave.”
Crowded space
Whereas in the 1960s, only the two superpowers had the means to launch satellites into orbit, now more than 70 countries have their own space agencies, Fuchs said. That’s in addition to entrepreneurs like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Virgin’s Richard Branson funneling private wealth into commercial spaceflight programs.
Just a few million euros can cover the costs of procuring and launching a small satellite into orbit, a figure within the realms of private enterprise.
“Launch prices have come down and access to space becomes more affordable for smaller players,” said a spokesman for Airbus, Europe’s largest aerospace company.
The total number of registered satellites in orbit (both military and civilian) will likely surpass 5,000 this year, according to the U.N. agency tasked with keeping track. More than 2,000 are operational at the moment, with thousands of pieces of space junk also floating around.
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Because Earth orbit is so crucial to just about every aspect of life, there’s growing pressure to militarize space.
Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to set up a “space force” as a distinct pillar of the military to police orbital threats. Meanwhile, India this year tested a new satellite-destroying missile, while both China and Russia are investing in everything from orbital drones to satellite jamming.
France, a country whose aerospace industry is crucial to both the national ego and the economy, this summer outlined plans for deploying weapons in orbit, arguing it needs to equip its satellites with machine guns and laser systems to counter threats.
Announcing the plan, French President Emmanuel Macron talked up the need for “strategic autonomy” in space. But while Berlin has co-funded surveillance satellites built for the French military, the German government is not enthusiastic about solo efforts to project force in orbit.
“We need a robust answer to the challenges in space but I see this as a job for the European Space Agency and the EU,” Thomas Jarzombek, an MP with Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union and the government’s coordinator on aerospace, said last month.
A December summit of NATO leaders is expected to designate space as a new domain in warfare, raising the thorny issue of whether an attack on a satellite belonging to an alliance member is enough to trigger the pact’s Article 5 collective defense provision.
Europe, we have a problem
The big issue for Europe is whether it wants to pay to play in the top leagues of space.
The European Commission’s proposed space spending of €16 billion is spread from 2021 to 2027, and aims to cover satellite programs and new projects like a secure government communication system and measures to address orbital debris.
That’s tiny in comparison to what others are doing. NASA’s annual budget is over $20 billion (which doesn’t include a sizeable U.S. military space program) and China is splashing around $8 billion each year on its own space industry.
Instead of going toe-to-toe with the U.S. and China, Brussels has pitched the bloc’s investments as part of a plan to become the good guy in orbit. EU countries have put around €10 billion into the Galileo geo-navigation constellation, a more accurate alternative to the U.S. Global Positioning System, while billions of euros have been spent on Copernicus, an Earth-observation system countries can use to monitor everything from climate change to natural disasters.
“To have free and open data access is the right way,” ESA Director General Jan Wörner said earlier this year. “It’s good for mankind.”
But Galileo was hit this summer by an embarrassing almost weeklong outage, understood to be partly due to a software update at a ground-based station near Munich. EU officials are quick to point out the constellation remains in its trial phase and the U.S. had decades to fine-tune GPS.
“To some extent, having such an incident during such a phase is unfortunately part of the process,” Pierre Delsaux, a deputy director general at the European Commission, told MEPs. But the downtime is not a good look for the EU or ESA, given its insistence in securing autonomous access to space independent of American technology.
Meanwhile, NASA has big ambitions, including sending astronauts back to the moon by 2024 under a project to be assisted by Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin.
Again, the EU is playing catch-up.
“We need to set in motion a process to define Europe’s vision for space,” Elżbieta Bieńkowska, the European commissioner for the internal market, told a meeting of space industry executives in January. She’s argued Europe needs to set an ambitious goal to capture public imagination, just as the original moon landing did in the 1960s.
Fuchs sees European policymakers pushing to develop a lunar presence of research installations. Other possibilities are a manned flight to Mars as well as missions to Venus and some of Jupiter’s moons, he said.
But if Europe wants to shoot for the moon and beyond, it will have to find the money to match those ambitions.
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