Europe gets space policy after Galileo setback

The EU and members of the European Space Agency (ESA) have endorsed a space policy, committing themselves to increasing co-ordination both of their defence and civilian programmes, just days after the EU’s satellite navigation project, Galileo, suffered a major setback.

The Commission-ESA joint documents on space policy were endorsed in the fourth European Space Council, a joint meeting of EU Competitiveness ministers and representatives from ESA member states, on 22 May 2007.

The Council also adopted a Resolution on the European Space Policy. It outlines the general vision and strategic guidelines for Europe’s future activities in space as well as further steps to be taken with regards implementation. Programmes related to applications include security and defence, access to space, international space station and exploration, science and technology, governance, industrial policy and international relations.

“Through this document, the EU, ESA and their member states commit themselves to increasing co-ordination of their activities and programmes and to organising their respective roles relating to space,” states an ESA press release.

With regards the security and defence dimension of the European space policy, the ministers recognised that “space technologies are often common between civilian and defence applications” and that Europe should therefore improve co-ordination between defence and civilian space programmes. They called for setting up “a structured dialogue” with the competent bodies in member states, the European Defence Agency and within the EU’s foreign policy, military matters and co-operation in the fight against crime.

However, the ministers underlined that “the uses made by any military users of Galileo or GMES [EU’s major project on Global Monitoring for Environment and Security] must be consistent with the principle that Galileo and GMES are civil systems under civil control”.

Galileo, so far promoted as the flagship of EU’s space activities, is hardly mentioned in the resolution. “I fully disagree, fully disagree, that Galileo is the most important project of European space policy. It is a project of traffic infrastructure,” said Commissioner Günter Verheugen. “The GMES is definitely more important than Galileo, as it offers a huge range of operations, whereas Galileo can only do one thing – help you to navigate, nothing else. In this sense, Galileo is in a certain way a stupid system.”

“The most important part of European space activities is the commercial use of information and communication satellites,” explained Verheugen.

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