“Europe must wake up” and secure its place in a fast developing new space race, the director of the European Space Agency (ESA) Dr. Josef Aschbacher has declared in an interview with The Telegraph, as he warned that the Continent was facing total dependence on outside powers to operate its space programme.
A €7 billion per annum transnational organisation consisting of 22 nations, the ESA has been crippled by the war in Ukraine, which has forced it to rely solely on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets to launch satellites into orbit after sanctions prevented it from using Russian Soyuz rockets.
The ESA, which includes the UK despite Brexit, is specifically charged with getting Europe’s strategically vital Galileo satellites into orbit, which is essential for European governments to maintain independent communication systems outside of the United States and China.
Dr. Aschbacher has been the director of the ESA since 2021, having previously served in the European Commission, an organisation often criticised as being tokenistic and lacking the same ambition and funding as NASA and other space agencies.
In his remarks to The Telegraph, Aschbacher broached the possibility of potential European spaceport facilities as an alternative to French Guiana in South America, as he hoped that European astronauts would make use of a new SpaceX lunar space station, ‘Lunar Gateway,’ expected to be launched in 2025 as a transit point to the Moon.
Dr. Aschbacher also linked the space programme to a wider civilisational mission to revitalise Europe, lamenting that young educated Europeans were looking to Silicon Valley, China, and even Saudi Arabia for the future instead of their continent.
Europe is drifting apart, but if you have a joint space project, all the countries will engage and will be proud of being part of it and being European.
The ESA director is also pushing for an increase to ESA’s budget saying that current funding levels are not nearly enough to secure Europe’s place in the stars and that losing the new space race would help end European strategic autonomy.
This comes ahead of a budgetary review in November where EU research ministers will decide on whether to fund the ESA’s plans to send European astronauts into space when the Lunar Gateway space station becomes operational in 2025.
Previous plans to increase the ESA’s budget by 25% hit the skids last year as European nations looked to scale back their financial contributions. Traditionally, within the ESA, France and Germany have focused their individual funding contributions on rocket research, while the UK has focused on telecommunications.
The ESA has been castigated over its failure to complete the production of its Ariane 6 hydrogen-powered rocket system meant to replace Europe’s current reliance on SpaceX and Russia, which will be in the developmental doldrums until 2024 at the earliest.
According to Dr. Aschbacher, Europe needs to invest now in space infrastructure lest it be left behind by rival powers and the private sector, with the ESA chief even raising the possibility of helping with spaceport facilities already existing on British soil.
The advent of multipolarity and geopolitical rivalries has reignited the space race in recent years as Western powers fear Chinese dominance in a looming return to lunar operations. Similar to the development of AI, Europe is increasingly stereotyped on the world stage as taking a backseat in new technological innovation and then suffering the geopolitical ramifications as other nations and regions move ahead at pace.
