The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, defended this Thursday, September 10, large-scale investments in the EU to guarantee space security, during the international space summit in Paris. The leader of the Community executive stressed that "to stay at the forefront, Europe must act together, invest on a large scale and transform our market into a competitive advantage," announcing "a new era" of technology.
Von der Leyen warned that "Earth's security increasingly depends on space security," pointing to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an example of the repercussions on European space. The President listed blocked and falsified navigation signals disturbing civil aviation, cyberattacks against satellite networks that put critical infrastructure out of service, and drones using technologies that depend on space navigation in European airspace.
Brussels considers the space economy a strategic opportunity, predicting that its global value will almost triple by 2035, going from about 630 billion to 1.8 trillion dollars. The EU has already mobilized two billion euros through the Cassini initiative and created the Scaleup Europe Fund, endowed with five billion euros, to finance strategic technologies.
For the next EU long-term budget, the Commission proposed an amount of 131 billion euros for defense, security and space, which represents five times more than the currently available funding. Von der Leyen called for coordinated European action and stressed that the choices made now will shape Europe's place in space for the coming decades.
