Between the launch of a new satellite by the European Vega rocket, and, last July, the take-off of Ariane 6, the launcher crisis seems well and truly over according to Josef Aschbacher, Director General of the European Space Agency. The agency is “on track to get out of [cette] crisis,” he believes. “ESA is delivering on its commitments. We successfully put Ariane 6 into orbit, and that is not nothing, because these rockets put satellites into orbit that we need in our daily lives. That is really fundamental. So it is a big step and a very big success for Europe. Recently, we launched Sentinel-2C, with the last flight of Vega. I think Europe can be very proud and very happy about this uninterrupted series of successes.”
**”**Europe is certainly making a comeback in the space race. We had a bit of a launcher crisis for almost a year, we didn’t have our own launch capacity, but with Ariane 6 back on the launch pad, and with Vega successfully launching Sentinel-2C, and Vega-C arriving at the end of the year, 2024 will certainly mark the end of the space launcher crisis in Europe.”
The director of the European Space Agency notes in this regard that the “main partner [de l’UE] In the United States, NASA had to rely on Russia for ten years to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. That is no longer the case, thanks to Space X and Crew Dragon, and the United States once again has its own capacity for human spaceflight.** But finding itself at the bottom of a long series of launches is not [quelque chose de] “totally unusual”.
Europe has therefore regained part of its strategic autonomy in the space domain, according to Josef Aschbacher, emphasizing that “Europe is really performing well in a number of areas. […] If we compare Europe to the United States, Europe accounts for one sixth of the world’s public investment in space. According to the figures, the United States invests about six times more in this sector; in the space industry, global public investment amounted to almost €108 billion for 2023, of which 64% is in the United States and 11% in Europe. Even though we invest much less than the United States in space, through NASA and the Space Force, Europe is still very efficient. And some of our programmes are among the best in the world. Copernicus is an example of this: we have built this programme over more than 25 years, and it is one of the best space programmes in the world for observing the Earth. We provide 300 TB of data to all citizens, all over the world, for agriculture, forestry, emergency services, civil protection, ship routing and many other areas, because this data is used in all areas of the economy. So this is a fantastic new programme. The other major programme that Europe has been developing for over 20 years is Galileo, which today provides the most accurate navigation signals in the world, more accurate than GPS.
Of course, there is still work to do to catch up on other programs, as we are in the process of doing with launchers.”
As far as the security field is concerned, “In the United States, nearly 65% of public investment is devoted to defense and security. In Europe, this percentage drops to around 12%. Again, the share devoted to [cette question] is much lower than that of the United States, within the framework of a much lower budget. […] But these are political decisions, it is not up to me to decide on these investments. And we expect investments to increase in this area.”
