Space industry: what are the scientific and geopolitical challenges for Europe?

On 14 April, JUICE (one of the European Space Agency’s most ambi­tious space explor­a­tion mis­sions) left on board one of the last Ariane 5 rock­ets bound for Jupiter. After 8 years of trav­el­ling through the Sol­ar Sys­tem and 3 grav­it­a­tion­al assists near the Earth and Venus, it will finally reach its des­tin­a­tion: Europa, Ganymede and Cal­listo, the icy moons of Jupiter. Its main object­ive is to veri­fy the exist­ence of the intern­al oceans of these nat­ur­al satel­lites and to bet­ter under­stand their char­ac­ter­ist­ics in order to determ­ine their rel­ev­ance to the search for life out­side Earth.

This excit­ing mis­sion to Jupiter is just one of Europe’s many space pro­jects. But where does Europe stand in rela­tion to its Amer­ic­an, Rus­si­an and Chinese com­pet­it­ors (and some­times part­ners)? What issues is it cur­rently tack­ling, and what chal­lenges does it need to anti­cip­ate for the future? The answer depends very much on what we call ‘space’…

« Doing more with less » is Europe’s credo when it comes to design­ing, build­ing and send­ing high-tech mis­sions into space to dis­cov­er the Universe. 

From 2019 to 2024, the budget of the European Space Agency (ESA) has been set at a total of 14.4 bil­lion euros (the price of a cinema tick­et paid each year by every European cit­izen). For the same peri­od, the total budget of the US Nation­al Aero­naut­ics and Space Admin­is­tra­tion (NASA) is around 123 bil­lion dol­lars, more than 8 times as much. The dif­fer­ence in fund­ing between the two agen­cies has always been enorm­ous, but this has not pre­ven­ted Europe from shin­ing with its sci­entif­ic mis­sions. The least we can say is that our cur­rent know­ledge of the Sol­ar Sys­tem has benefited greatly from all the European explor­a­tion missions.

NAS­A’s budget is 8 times that of the ESA.

The Sun (Ulysses, Sol­ar Orbit­er), Mer­cury (Bepi Colombo), Venus (Venus Express), the Moon (SMART‑1), Mars (Mars Express, Exo­Mars TGO), Sat­urn (and the land­ing of the Huy­gens mod­ule on Titan), comets (Rosetta): all these bod­ies have been observed, ana­lysed, mon­itored and probed by teams of sci­ent­ists and engin­eers from the European Space Agency. And the future already holds a wealth of new mis­sions. The Bepi-Colombo probe, launched in 2018, is on its way to Mer­cury; the JUICE probe, which left Earth last April, will reach Jupiter in 2031; and finally the HERA mis­sion will take off at the end of 2024 to observe the impact crater that the Amer­ic­an DART probe cre­ated by deflect­ing the small aster­oid Dimorphos.

Plan­et­ary explor­a­tion is just one part of Europe’s sci­entif­ic explor­a­tion pro­gramme. The dis­tant Uni­verse can some­times only be observed from space, by pla­cing tele­scopes far from Earth. XMM-New­ton (X‑rays), Integ­ral (gamma rays) and Gaïa (vis­ible light) are all spe­cial­ised instru­ments that have revolu­tion­ised our under­stand­ing of stars and galax­ies. In July 2023, the European space tele­scope Euc­lid will be sent 1.5 mil­lion km from Earth to tackle the entire Uni­verse and the fam­ous mys­tery of dark energy, respons­ible for its expansion.

But the major space agen­cies can­not sup­port all the pro­grammes they launch on their own, which also encour­ages their com­pet­it­ors to enter into fruit­ful part­ner­ships. For example, Europe par­ti­cip­ated in the devel­op­ment of the fam­ous James Webb space tele­scope, thereby sav­ing obser­va­tion time for its sci­entif­ic teams. In the Artemis pro­gramme, half of the Ori­on space­craft (its ser­vice mod­ule) was man­u­fac­tured in Europe, as were sev­er­al mod­ules of the future Gate­way lun­ar space sta­tion, guar­an­tee­ing European astro­nauts places in this vast pro­gramme to return to the Moon.

Unfor­tu­nately, inter­na­tion­al col­lab­or­a­tion also means being depend­ent on oth­er coun­tries and being sens­it­ive to geo­pol­it­ic­al uncer­tain­ties. Fol­low­ing the war with Ukraine, Rus­si­a’s with­draw­al in 2022 from the Exo­Mars pro­gramme (planned land­ing on Mars of the first European Mars rover) has sig­ni­fic­antly delayed this mis­sion. The time needed to man­u­fac­ture the part of the probe that was ded­ic­ated to Rus­sia has now passed, and the launch is not sched­uled before 2028.

Not everything is going well for Europe in space. On the sci­entif­ic front, things are look­ing up, but on the indus­tri­al and com­mer­cial front, things are more uncer­tain. Fol­low­ing a num­ber of delays, the future Ariane 6 (which was ini­tially due to be launched before Ariane 5’s final lift-off, to provide a tech­nic­al link between the two) will not actu­ally be able to leave before 2024, leav­ing at least one year without Europe being able to use its launch­er to pur­sue its space pro­grammes (sci­entif­ic, com­mer­cial and mil­it­ary). In the mean­time, there is a risk that some private cus­tom­ers will turn to oth­er solu­tions for access to space (Amer­ic­an or even Indi­an), ser­i­ously threat­en­ing Europe’s autonomy in this area.

The emer­gence on the oth­er side of the Atlantic of a new com­mer­cially aggress­ive and agile private space sec­tor, based on the use of new tech­no­lo­gies and great­er (eco­nom­ic and tech­no­lo­gic­al) risk-tak­ing, is also push­ing the com­mer­cial organ­isa­tion of European space to its lim­its (where New Space also star­ted, but later, and has developed less than in the United States).

The intern­al work­ings of the European Space Agency are also being called into question.

In Decem­ber 2022, ESA signed a €33 mil­lion con­tract with ArianeGroup (France) to devel­op a reusable (oxygen/methane) space­craft called Themis, powered by its new Pro­meth­eus engine. Tests are due to take place in Kiruna (Sweden) by 2024, then in Kour­ou (French Guiana) in 2025–2026. Will this new European reusable tech­no­logy be ready in time? Will it find its place in Europe’s com­mer­cial offer­ing against oth­er nations? Only time will tell.

But more gen­er­ally, the intern­al work­ings of the European Space Agency are also being called into ques­tion. The prin­ciple of « geo­graph­ic­al return », for example, whereby Europe invests in each Mem­ber State (in the form of con­tracts awar­ded to its industry to carry out space activ­it­ies) an amount equi­val­ent to that coun­try’s con­tri­bu­tion. The idea is to enable the coun­try’s com­pan­ies to win cer­tain con­tracts and acquire new tech­no­lo­gies. But the oth­er side of the coin is that this sys­tem gen­er­ates polit­ic­al dis­agree­ments between the lead­ers of each state, in addi­tion to being man­aged by a cum­ber­some and slow administration.

Will we be able to pri­or­it­ise sci­entif­ic and tech­no­lo­gic­al interests at the expense of polit­ic­al interests? The next stra­tegic decisions will be taken in 2025, at the next ESA min­is­teri­al meet­ing. In the mean­time, we are wit­ness­ing major eco­nom­ic, geo­pol­it­ic­al and stra­tegic changes, and the response of Europe in space is awaited by many with interest… and impatience.