European governments confirmed a hefty investment at a ministerial summit in Bremen, pledging to develop a new security space programme with the European Space Agency (ESA). This marks the first time the agency’s capabilities will be border with Defence as well as civilian use. The decision signals a strategic change for Europe at a time when the space ambitions are impacted by the rise of geopolitical tensions and military activities in orbit. The European Resilience from Space (ERS) project aims to create a highly advanced, integrated network that links national satellite systems with new assets, ensuring a secure common platform.
The initiative would provide defence intelligence, secure communications, navigation, and reconnaissance capabilities, while at the same time, it would serve wider civilian purposes such as disaster management and earth observation. ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher said that the agency had received a very clear mandate from its 23 member states to offer services that are defence-oriented even though the agency’s founding charter in the 1970s emphasized peaceful applications. Aschbacher said that defence-related programmes represent only a small portion of ESA’s planned budget — about 5 per cent — but he saw the decision as the first big step towards a long-term shift of the kind. He called the political support “the crystal clear mandate” and noticed that nearly all member states exceeded their financial commitments compared to the initial budget requests.
ERS was funded to the tune of about €1.2 billion of the €1.35 billion initially requested at the summit. There is an expectation of an additional €250 million to be sought from local defence ministries at the beginning of the next year. Some parts of the ESA project attracted more money than was requested, indicating that there is a great demand for secure European space capabilities and a correspondingly high level of concern about the vulnerabilities of the European space sector.
The shift in focus comes amid rising concerns about the space activities of China and Russia that are becoming more and more assertive. The war that Russia started in Ukraine is a case in point that shows how dependent communications, navigation, and intelligence services on satellites have become, and hence the inescapable need for Europe to be independent. At the Bremen meeting, ERS also got a record big funding increase representing almost the entire budget of €22.3 billion over the next three years, totaling to €22.1 billion. If we take the inflationary factor out, then this 17 per cent increase is one of the very few and largest funding expansions in the history of the agency. Germany made a great step forward as the largest contributor to ESA’s budget and got assurance that an astronaut from Germany will be the first European to go to the moon in NASA’s Artemis programme. France and Italy still major contributors, and Spain is now fourth largest player after it passed the United Kingdom. The money has been injected into the development of reusable micro- and mini-launchers, which is part of the European strategy to build a commercial space and be less dependent on foreign rockets after it has had a few failures with a heavy launch vehicle called Ariane 6. The pledges for this program exceeded the initial proposal by ESA as over €4 billion was allocated which is approximately one-fifth of the total ESA budget.
The backing of scientific exploration did not falter either. The long-postponed Rosalind Franklin rover mission that is aimed at finding life signs on Mars will launch in 2028 now that NASA’s commitment for the launch and engineering support has been verified. ESA will also finance feasibility studies for a mission to Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn, considered by astrobiologists, the most likely place in the solar system to find alien life. The analysts argue that the following year will be a turning point. It will mainly depend on additional funding and the demonstration of Europe’s capability to quickly put together an independent intelligence satellite network. But right now, the Bremen summit is a historic leap towards a stronger, more assertive European space presence –a space where defence and security concerns go hand in hand with scientific research and commercial growth.
