WARSAW – The European Space Agency is drawing up plans for a military-grade reconnaissance satellite network with the EU as part of a record €21 billion budget spend, the agency’s director-general, Josef Aschbacher, has told Euractiv.
War in Ukraine and geopolitical strife with the United States have blasted away any reluctance to talk about defence investment at ESA, prompting Aschbacher to discuss the spending plans at a meeting of EU officials in Warsaw on Tuesday.
“We have a package that we have prepared already … which today is in the order of about €21 billion, plus or minus,” said Aschbacher.
The space agency isn’t part of the EU but has a partially overlapping membership that also includes the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Every three years, ESA member states’ space ministers meet to hash out spending on a range of science and exploration programmes, which they distribute among themselves.
At the last summit in Paris in 2022, capitals pledged a record €16.9 billion.
National budget constraints were expected to throttle any efforts to further increase the budget at the next gathering of ministers in Bremen in November.
But Elon Musk’s threats to cut off Ukrainian access to Starlink and a belligerent White House have upended those assumptions, and focused attention on developing space assets as part of a broader European defence push.
As part of the Bremen plan, Aschbacher is working to develop a reconnaissance satellite constellation programme that would beam ultra-high-resolution optical infrared imaging from anywhere in the world every 20 or 30 minutes to militaries and governments on demand.
A number of EU companies, including Finland-based ICEYE, which provides commercial satellite services to Ukraine, have called for such a programme to boost the bloc’s startup scene.
“That’s a complete game changer, we do not have this in Europe,” said Aschbacher of the plan. “I know China is building it up, and the US is building it up.”
Once all the programmes are totalled up, the final ESA budget figure that will be taken to ministers in November will be “above” €21 billion, the Austrian space chief said. That marks the Bremen meet as “an opportunity that cannot be missed”.
Europe is still a relative minnow, spending a fifth of what the US budgets every year for its space programmes.
For one, the incoming German government – which overtook France as the largest ESA budget contributor last time around and is a hotbed for rocket startups – has made clear that it intends to further increase its spending at the Bremen summit to help the mission catch up.
(bts)