Europe faces down cosmic chaos
The Europeans are a part of an intensifying struggle over who gets to set the rules in space
A new race for outer space is well underway — and Europe has its work cut out to keep up.
Long a realm for dreamers and schemers, the final frontier is now a battleground of great power stratagems, new communications technologies and commercial ambitions.
“The rise in geo-political tensions we see on earth is being extended and projected into space,” declared EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, in a speech on Tuesday at the opening day of the 12th European Space Conference. “Europe has a massive stake in the future of space. Our future prosperity and security depend on that.”
It’s little surprise that Mr Borrell’s appearance at the Brussels gathering felt like a busman’s holiday from worldly crises such as those in Libya and Iran. Earthly powers including Russia and China also loom large above the stratosphere, where they are challenging the US and European countries.
The EU’s flagships in what Mr Borrell and others have dubbed the “increasingly congested, contested and competitive” near cosmos are the Galileo navigation and Copernicus earth observation satellites. They and other vessels face a growing potential threat from increasingly sophisticated satellite disruption techniques deployed by hostile craft, including kinetic weapons, “dazzle” with directed radiation and cyberattacks.
The Europeans are also part of an intensifying struggle over who gets to set the rules in space, which is only loosely governed by broad principles set out in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. The US launched an effort in 2018 to set regulations on space traffic management — a powerful tool of control, as the number of governmental and private vessels in orbit grows ever larger.
Brexit is another complicating factor for European efforts in space. While Britain will remain in the European Space Agency — which already includes the non-EU states Norway and Switzerland — it faces being shut out of bloc projects, including Galileo. On the EU side, space funding faces a potential hit as member states grapple with how to achieve needed savings because of London’s lost contributions to the bloc’s long-term budget.
A final task for Europe is an existential one confronting all countries active outside the Earth’s atmosphere: the growing amount of “space junk”, including decommissioned satellites and debris generated from vessels’ encounters with foreign objects. The risk is rising of a disastrous collision that could destroy essential communications and data gathering systems, or even send a satellite plummeting to earth.
It is, as Jean-Loïc Galle, president of Thales Alenia Space, points out, everyone’s problem and no-one’s responsibility — and so a microcosm of the lawless environment in which the Europeans are vying to hold their own.