The strategic autonomy of the continent, subject Wednesday of a meeting of the European ministers responsible for the spatial, must in particular move through the deployment of a European satellite constellation.
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“Allo the Earth? Here Europe.” Confronted with Americans and Chinese, who relaunched the spatial conquest, but also to the Russians, who made a demonstration of force in November 2021 by sending a missile destroy a satellite , Europeans want to affirm their presence in space and, above all, preserve their sovereignty. A challenge all the more complex that the environment has totally changed for about ten years.
From now, private actors like ELON MUSK, founder of Spacex, and Jeff Bezos, creator of Amazon, give the tone by innovating quickly and breaking the traditional functioning of a sector governed so far by the major space agencies . This requires Europeans to react quickly and adapt, on pain of being overshadowed.
Wednesday, February 16 in Toulouse, as part of the French Presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), Emmanuel Macron has set the main axes to guarantee the strategic autonomy of the continent, at an informal meeting Ministers responsible for space. With, as priorities, securing the Internet and communications, as well as the management of space traffic.
These proposals were presented the day before in Strasbourg by the European Commission, in the margins of a parliamentary session. They will then have to be approved by the Member States and the European Parliament. They will then be integrated into the development of the EU’s “strategic compass”, a “white paper” defining the main orientations of European security and defense until 2030.
Classic actors and start-up
Since the spring of 2019, the race is accelerating to broadcast broadband Internet throughout the planet, with a net American advantage. ELON MUSK stands out with Starlink, a well advanced project of a constellation of 42,000 satellites, while Jeff Bezos is preparing to launch his own network, Kuiper. The British took over the US Constellation OneWeb, gradually operational, and Canadians are building their, baptized Lightspeed. As for the Chinese, they are also very present.
Refusing to see the Member States dependent on a private and non-European supplier, Thierry Breton, the Commissioner in charge of space has, as early as December 2020, launched the idea of a European constellation. For geostrategic and defense questions, it is essential for Europe to be autonomous, as it has become for geolocation with Galileo against the American GPS system, or for the observation of the Earth with the Copernicus service.
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