European Centre for Counterterrorism and Intelligence Studies, Germany & Netherlands – ECCI
Is EU’s first space commissioner launched on low-orbit mission?
euronews – Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s second term will see the first-ever commissioner for defence and space. But his mission and support do not match the recognition seen at the policy level, analysts and industry representatives argue.
Andrius Kubilius, the Lithuanian commissioner-designate, has been given a newly-created portfolio with responsibility for both EU defence and space – yet researchers and industry representatives fear that despite the many challenges, space will end up as a secondary priority with no real ambition.
“I’m a bit worried that because there’s so little work being done on space [policy], there will be no interest, no budget, no nothing,” Reinhilde Veugelers, senior fellow at the Brussels-based economic think tank Bruegel, told Euronews.
In her mission letter to Kubilius, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen gives the former Lithuanian prime minister a mission of continuity, calling for further implementation of the EU’s space strategy for security and defence and to maintain the bloc’s ‘cost-effective access to space’.
But von der Leyen foresees only two new proposals for the next five-year mandate: the EU space law, which was expected before the summer break, and a space data economy strategy to unlock the potential of space-derived data, products and technologies.
“There is a clear challenge to scale up the ambition in the new commissioner’s portfolio,” said Tomas Hrozensky, senior researcher at the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI), noting that while the role of space in security and defence has received unprecedented recognition at the policy level, the institutional, programmatic scale of support is still lacking and the industrial dimension is undervalued.
Overall, European institutional funding of space programmes is fragmented and only 20% of the US level, creating an imbalance with key competitors such as the US and China in terms of industrial capacity and specialised workforce, said Mario Draghi’s landmark report on competitiveness.
In recent years, the EU has fallen behind in space activities and faced significant supply chain disruptions, first due to the Covid-19 pandemic and then as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As a result, the EU’s space industry has become less profitable, with lower sales, especially in launchers and satellite systems, and has become more reliant on components like semiconductors and detectors, as Draghi pointed out.
Lemaitre believes it’ll be crucial for the EU and its member states to come up with and implement strategies that stabilize production, promote large-scale manufacturing, increase the use of recurring systems for operational missions, and develop standardized interfaces.
For the Bruegel researcher, a closer link between the space and defence portfolios could already be a first improvement in the short term.”We’re not exploiting the potential complementarities that would make defence and space work more effectively,” said Veugelers.
