The European Commission is poised to introduce Europe's first comprehensive space law. As highlighted by President Von der Leyen and Commissioner Kubilius, the forthcoming space act aims to consolidate Europe’s competitiveness in the global space sector and strengthen the EU’s space single market while ensuring its safety, resilience, and sustainability.
To achieve this ambitious goal, it is essential to maximize synergies between Europe’s public administrations. EU institutions, member states and regional and local governments must collaborate to ensure that Europe remains a key player in the global space race.
Within this framework, regional and local governments, as the tier of administration closest to local space ecosystems (companies, research centres, space infrastructure, etc.) and end users (other productive sectors, citizens, public administration, defence, etc), play a critical role in maximizing the law’s impact and effectiveness.
From this standpoint, the added value of space extends beyond the sector itself. Applying space solutions in non-space sectors to enhance public administration services and the digital transformation of productive sectors significantly increases the commercial value of Europe's space infrastructure.
However, despite the potential of downstream services like Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT), Earth Observation (EO) or Secure Connectivity (SC) across various administrative domains, their broad adoption throughout Europe still faces challenges. Space data must be converted into useful information that can generate the intended aggregated value. The Defence sector across the EU can also strongly benefit from the development of the civil sector and increase its capacity with dual use technologies and opening new funding opportunities.
The new regulation should facilitate the integration of satellite-based data into the decisions and processes of public and private sector entities. Streamlining processes and promoting public policies can reinforce and facilitate this adoption in many areas crucial for citizens, such as agriculture, fishery, land management, transport, environmental protection, security, risk and disaster management and novel services for sustainable tourism, infrastructure and energy management.
At the same time, it is crucial to ensure that our satellite data-based solutions are widely trusted to be adopted in procedures between governments and citizens, such as certifying in regional policies for control, taxation, subsidies, etc. In this regard, an EU Space Dataset would help build this trust in space data and facilitate the uptake of administrative processes.
Further, an end-user perspective is advisable. EU (e.g. Copernicus, Galileo, IRIS2, Destination Earth, etc.), member state and regional and local initiatives should be accessible transparently according to users’ needs.
Therefore, we propose proactive inclusion of downstream services. This would significantly contribute to fostering market uptake of Galileo/EGNOS/Copernicus-based data and services and would undoubtedly help Europe's satellite data economy thrive.
The new regulation should also bolster support for the emerging number of space startups across Europe that are key for accelerating innovation collaborating with the consolidated companies in the space sector. This point is crucial in order not to be left behind in achieving technological sovereignty.
The upcoming EU space act presents a significant opportunity to set a framework for higher integrity on the supply side which contributes to higher data quality and thus increases trust and recognition among public users on the demand side, ultimately stimulating broader and more systematic uptake.
Local and regional governments, hand in hand with local space ecosystems, are ready to play their part in efforts to consolidate Europe’s space sector, but it is also essential that our voices are heard and considered.
Vincenzo Colla, Vice President of Emilia-Romagna
Artur Lima, Vice President of the Azores
Miquel Sàmper, Minister of Business and Labour of Catalonia
The governments of the above-mentioned regions are members of the Disruptive & Emerging Technology Alliance (DETA). More information: See: https://aeur.eu/f/gt0