On Tuesday 27 January, the European Commissioner for Space, Andrius Kubilius, announced the launch of GOVSATCOM operations, aimed at providing secure satellite communications.
“Last week we started GOVSATCOM operations. That means all Member States can now have access to sovereign satellite communication – military and government, secure and encrypted, built in Europe – operated in Europe, under European control”, he detailed in a speech to the 18th European Space Conference in Brussels. “We have eight satellites from five countries providing precisely this service”, he told the media. “We’re putting some of our heritage resources into GOVSATCOM”, French Minister Philippe Baptiste told journalists including Agence Europe.
The Commissioner also announced that GOVSATCOM’s coverage would be extended in 2027 and its bandwidth increased “to cover the whole world”. “We will be buying this new capacity from commercial partners, with extra security”, he explained.
Mr Kubilius also announced that the military frequencies of the European IRIS² Ka secure telecommunications satellite constellation programme were now operational, “allowing for governmental services”.
In his words, this is a “very import event showing the progress of IRIS² and the value of the public-private partnership model”, with the use of existing satellites by private partners.
The Commissioner expressed his confidence that it will be possible to roll out the first IRIS² services by 2029. The initial target was 2030. However, a European source sounded a note of caution about competition between Europeans, as several Member States are also planning to launch national programmes of the IRIS² type. “In Europe, it makes no sense to launch several competing programmes”, the source warned.
Space Shield. In addition to concrete progress in space, Mr Kubilius announced that later this year he would present the ‘European Space Shield’, one of four flagship initiatives for EU security. “This plan provides for the pooling and sharing of national capacities, in addition to dedicated European capacities”, in particular GOVSATCOM and IRIS², he added. “The Space Shield will also protect space against radio frequency interference. And with the independent European Space Surveillance and Tracking System (EU SST). Now in this area, we depend on the United States”, explained Mr Kubilius, adding that EU Member States must request authorisation to share data on threats.
In this context, the Commissioner called for a space command partnership, “a cooperation framework, a virtual European Space command”. According to him, “if there’s a crisis, if there’s a war, national space commands can quickly mobilise space assets for national defence. But there is no process for mobilising European assets for our joint defence”.
Moving forward on the Space Act. Another subject on the table is the European legislation on space, the ‘Space Act’, presented last June by the European Commission and which is the subject of numerous questions from Member States and actors in the sector (see EUROPE 13769/20).
Present at the conference, the Deputy Minister for Research, Innovation and Digital Policy, Nicodemos Damianou, promised that one of the priorities of the Cyprus Presidency of the Council of the EU would be to work on the ‘Space Act’ (see EUROPE 13781/11). “The compromise text they [the Danish Presidency of EU Council] have put forward provides a solid constructive foundation”, explained the minister, recalling that this legislation was “the first attempt to create a unified regulatory pillar for the single market in space”. “Europe needs rules that enable rather than inhibit (...) Our objective is to deliver a framework that harmonizes the internal market without imposing administrative barriers that stifle our SMEs, our startups, and our scaleups. We want a space act that provides legal certainty for operators, facilities for cross-border activities”, he added.
Interviewed by Agence Europe, Philippe Baptiste said that the project still needed to be simplified. “We probably need to simplify things a little so that we have a uniform framework, so that everyone has the same opportunities, and so that there is no backdoor for non-European actors operating in Europe without the constraints that European actors have”, he explained.
The Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA), Joseph Aschbacher, said that while fears of duplication were legitimate, “EU space legislation has the potential to clarify roles, avoid unnecessary overlap and limit bureaucracy”.
Space funding. The year 2026 will also be marked by negotiations for the EU’s next Multiannual Financial Framework. The European Commission is proposing a budget of €131 billion for defence and space for 2028-2034. According to Mr Aschbacher, “it is appropriate that at least half of this sum should be devoted to the space sector”. ESA’s Director General pointed out that, of the Agency’s €22.3 billion budget decided last November, “€9.4 billion is earmarked for the preparation of future activities with the European Commission. The ESA Ministerial Council has set the tone by clearly underlining the concrete value of space in addressing Europe’s strategic and societal challenges”, he added, while for the first time ESA member states have met the Agency’s budget requests.
Andrius Kubilius said that the EU needed to make progress on launchers, in particular launchers that could be reused. “That’s why we’ve made the launch a top priority for the next MFF”, he explained. Yohann Leroy, CEO of Maiaspace, one of the shortlisted competitors in the European Launcher Challenge (ELC), told Agence Europe that the first test of his reusable launcher, which will be able to carry satellites of up to 4 tonnes into low-Earth orbit, will be carried out by the end of 2026, from Kourou (see EUROPE 13675/27).
International Space Summit. Lastly, the French Minister spoke about the international space summit to be held in Paris in the first half of July (see EUROPE 13751/24). “We hope to bring together all the actors in the space sector from all over the world, and it looks like that will be the case”, he explained, adding that the United States and China had confirmed their participation.
Scientific programmes, regulatory issues, including space traffic, frequency issues and current space management, as well as security and defence issues, should all be addressed at the summit. “We will also have a chapter devoted to Europe, how it works today and how it can be improved for the future”, concluded Philippe Baptiste. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)