According to the information we had managed to glean on Thursday 31 May, the European Commission intends to allocate €9.7 billion to the Galileo European satellite navigation programme, €5.8 billion for the Copernicus space observation programme and €500 million for other initiatives in the space domain, such as the Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) initiative and the governmental telecommunications GovSatCom programme.
It is likely that the Commission will present a single regulation, instead of the two regulations it had planned up to now (a regulation for Galileo and Egnos and a regulation for Copernicus, as well as the decision for the SST). The regulation is expected to include a transversal section on the major principles of governance by defining the role of the European Space Agency (ESA), the European GNSS Agency (GSA) and the European Commission. It is then expected to combine the programming parts (Galileo, Copernicus, SST, GovSatCom).
At the beginning of May, the European Commission announced a budget of around €16 billion in current prices or €14 billion in constant prices for 2018 for post-2020 space policy (see EUROPE 12013). Several MEPs welcomes this amount, including Monika Hohlmeier (EPP, Germany), the President of Parliament’s “sky and space” intergroup (see EUROPE 12014).
It is true that earlier in the year, the space sector had appealed for an overall budget of €22 billion (see EUROPE 12004), but several sources close to the dossier indicate that the European research and innovation, Horizon Europe, will include specific space sector projects. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)