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PARIS – Josef Aschbacher, the head of the European Space Agency, said member states are quickly changing how they view space, from its role in geopolitics, to the need for sovereign capabilities to working more closely with their national security counterparts.
During a Sept. 15 interview here at World Space Business Week, Aschbacher, the agency’s director general, discussed ESA’s agenda and the ambitious budget negotiations ahead of November’s ministerial conference. He also talked about the importance of an ongoing launch competition and the need to deepen commercial partnerships.
The following excerpt has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Mike Gruss: How do you make your case – not just here in Paris or not just this week – but what do you say to Europe’s leaders about the need to invest in space? Why now? And what can be gained and what can be lost? This is a big part of the ESA 2040 plan, exploring and discovering and but also inspiration. But how do you inspire countries’ leaders?
Josef Aschbacher: Well, as you say, space is inspiring, and certainly has a lot of inspirational moments and milestones to offer. But we are having a ministerial conference this year in November in Bremen, in Germany. And there, I really have to talk a lot to decision makers; sometimes heads of government, heads of state or the ministers in charge of space, to really explain the case. And I boil it down to simple arguments. And I think that there are two strands that are really convincing, at least for most of them.
One is space is a very interesting economic sector. It grows by about 10% per year. We have a space economy of about 500 billion, 600 billion euros today. And this grows to 1.8 trillion euros, which is the figure very often quoted. So if you just extrapolate these figures, it’s about 9% to 10% per year of the global space economy. So there’s not many sectors of the economy with such a growth. If you take health, transport, energy; they are not going as fast as space. So space is, purely from an economic perspective, extremely interesting and extremely convincing as an argument. Plus, if you invest one euro in space, we estimated about five to seven euros come back into the economy through new services, taxes and new businesses that are being developed. So there’s the economic argument, and some countries or some leaders are more attuned to economic arguments, and some others a bit less.
The other argument that has really come extremely strong just recently is geopolitics. Space is a tool of geopolitics. We see it extremely clearly in the United States, but also in China and Russia and other countries. And also in Europe. If I say geopolitics, it also means linking it much better, much tighter to defense and security.
And this is quite a new development in Europe, but this has not been happening as strong as today. Since [the last] couple of months, really, we have a very different debate on how space can be useful for countries to build up strength, to build up strength also in defense; to couple defense and space much better. We have a commissioner in Brussels in charge of space and defense, Mr. [Andrius] Kubilius. With him, we are working extremely well and very closely and together with my member states. We are really having a very strong debate there, actually, to the point where member states have asked me to come with very concrete proposals on how to utilize our space assets much more for security and defense.
So how do you move from a place where space is viewed as separate from the military, where space does not have national security purposes to ‘Hey, maybe we can try dual-use technologies,’ or there can be overlap in how to think about some of these capabilities.
There will always be dual use technology. That means, if you invest in space, it certainly has a civilian usage, and a military usage. I take a very simple example, or a very obvious one, which is meteorology. We are building meteorological satellites, either geostationary or polar orbiting. And there’s one type of satellite we are building, of course, in a network with global partners like the U.S., Japan and others, to exchange data, but it’s one type of data. There’s not a military meteorological satellite and a civilian one. It’s one type of satellite, and then the data streams go civilian and defense, for the air force and for the farmer or for the tourist or whoever needs a weather forecast. So that’s a very good example that shows that space technology actually is by nature, dual use.
But what you mentioned, and this is really a change also in Europe, in terms of argumentation and developing the case is that in the past – and also we as European Space Agency – we’ve been mostly focusing on science, civilian applications, civilian programs, if I may call them that way. We are quite good in Earth observation, we have a navigation program called Galileo, which is extremely good, actually the world’s most accurate signal right now in terms of positioning and timing. And we are very good also in space science, that means to explore the universe, sometimes together with NASA, sometimes through our own missions. So there we are, I would say, at world standard, and really having a capacity that is extremely well respected and well recognized.
But on more defense related programs, we are really catching up. We have done some statistics globally of the space budget. Even if the space budget is dual use, if you would divide it into funding sources from defense or civilian sources, it’s about 50% defense funding and 50% civilian funding, except in Europe, where the share is only 15%. So you see that in Europe the defense ministry, so the defense secretaries or ministers of defense are allocating a much lower share to space and for example, in the U.S. or in other countries.
And that’s something that is being recognized.
And that’s expected to change.
And is expected to change very fast, especially now with the defense budgets being increased everywhere, also in Europe, with new NATO targets, and many ministers or ministries of defense are really recognizing now the need to link space and defense much tighter. That is obvious, I think, for somebody in the U.S. — it’s probably very obvious. But in Europe, this has been not so obvious for many years, and this is now happening. Also, the debate that we have in the European Space Agency with my member states today is a very different debate compared to half a year ago or one year ago. Certainly a change has happened very, very fast and very significantly in Europe.
And so I would imagine that also means a close relationship for you with some of these militaries, or some of the space components of some of the European militaries, so that these capabilities can overlap.
Yeah, it’s clear. I mean, if you are working to develop capabilities for the defense or security actors, then you need to talk to them. Otherwise you don’t understand their needs. Of course, the needs are formally expressed either by European Commission —the commissioner for space and defense — or through our member states. But you’re absolutely right. We are getting much more interactions compared especially what we had in the past.
This article is an excerpt of the CEO Series of our Space Minds podcast, recorded on-site at the World Space Business Week conference in Paris. You can watch the full interview here.
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