Martin Sion, CEO of Arianegroup, which produces the European Ariane 6 rocket, denounced on Friday the “centrifugal movements” which would undermine Europe’s space sovereignty, reacting to the rapprochement between Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the American billionaire Elon Musk.
“This is something that concerns us,” declared the boss of Arianegroup, a Franco-German company created in 2015 and owned equally by Airbus and Safran.
“Something that weakens our activity”
“The notion of European preference must be at the top of the agenda of different European countries. Because if there is no European market, there will be no sustainable initiatives in which there is development with private investment,” continued Martin Sion during a meeting organized by AJPAE, association of aerospace journalists. “When European states make decisions to launch institutional satellites on non-European launchers, it is frankly something that weakens our activity,” he added.
In the wake of Giorgia Meloni’s whirlwind visit on Saturday to President-elect Donald Trump in Florida, Italian media reported that the government was in advanced talks with SpaceX for a 1.5 billion euro contract to supply secure telecommunications to Italy.
The Italian Prime Minister denied, Thursday, having discussed such a contract with Elon Musk, but acknowledged that SpaceX had presented to the government “a technology allowing secure communication at the national level, but above all at the planetary level, which for us above all means guaranteeing secure communications with our diplomatic representations and, for example, our military contingents abroad.”
“Rediscover the path to cooperation”
Faced with space powers like the United States and China, “for Europe to maintain its rank as a world power, at some point, we will have to find the path to cooperation,” underlined Martin Sion.
While waiting for Ariane 6, whose inaugural flight took place successfully in July, Europe had been deprived of access to space for a year, the Russian Soyuz being no longer used after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The next flight of Ariane 6, its first “operational” with the French military observation satellite CSO-3, initially planned for December, will take place “between mid-February and the end of March”, declared this Friday Caroline Arnoux, responsible for of Arianespace, a subsidiary of Arianegroup.
