Europe has strong space assets but it is underfunded, too slow and too fragmented in comparison to the U.S., European Space Agency boss Josef Aschbacher warned on Thursday.
“If we’re not making big changes, we will never catch up. We will always run behind, and this is, of course, a big risk,” he told POLITICO’s Speakeasy at the GLOBSEC forum in Prague.
As American companies, most notably Elon Musk’s SpaceX, continue to dominate the market across technologies including rockets, satellites and artificial intelligence, space has become a strategic battleground for powering communications and critical infrastructure.
The war between Russia and Ukraine has illustrated the dependencies. SpaceX — whose dominance in low-Earth orbit through systems such as Starlink has raised concerns over wartime connectivity for countries relying on it like Ukraine — should be “a wake-up call to really think about what Europe needs for its own autonomy,” he said.
Aschbacher referred to Europe as a “sleeping beauty” with “excellent capacities,” citing Galileo and Copernicus — the EU’s satellite navigation and Earth observation programs — as successes, but said Europe needs more funding, faster decision-making and “defragmentation.”
He pointed to the U.S. accounting for 60 percent of global public space funding, with Europe trailing behind at just 10 percent. “I would ask the decision-makers to multiply our investment by a factor of two, at least, if not three,” he said.
“There is no alternative. We have to do it. This is not, for me, a plan B,” Aschbacher said.
