You already have Europe’s secret weapon – You just don’t know its name

Many may wonder if international summits, where no official decisions are made, have any meaning. After listening to the endless talk of politicians at numerous summits, the same thought has sometimes crept into my own mind.

Some attributed the Paris Space Summit to the host of the meeting, the President of France Emmanuel Macronas a last testament and poorly organized. Both can be true, but at the same time one can ask why the first space summit in history was organized in Europe only now.

The answer is that first you need celebratory speeches, then you need a crisis that forces you to act, and at the same time resourceful entrepreneurs and companies have already come up with solutions on how things should be handled.

The United States and Russia have been needed to wake up to Europe’s space crisis. Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine has shown that you can’t succeed in a war if you don’t have satellite connections. Like the Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson succinctly stated in Paris: “Without space capabilities, you lose the war.”

Unfortunately, Ukraine’s defensive struggle is critically dependent Elon Musk’s About Starlink, the use of which is decided by the American billionaire, and during the war in Ukraine, Musk has limited the military use of Starlink in certain operations, which has weakened Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

The President of the Republic also intervened in Paris on this issue Alexander Stubbwho appealed to Musk to allow Ukraine to use Starlink more widely than it currently does.

At the same time, small and agile companies such as Iceyehave developed solutions that Ukraine can use as a substitute for Starlink dependence. Namely, Iceye already provides Ukraine with about 40 percent of the satellite data it needs.

Another reason for Europe’s awakening has been that Donald Trump’s led by the United States has excluded Europeans from joint space programs by suddenly changing their content and purpose. The Americans have the right to this, of course, even if this kind of activity does not fit into traditional long-term space cooperation. That’s why it’s no wonder that Europe is thinking about what kind of unpleasant surprises can happen in the future.

This brings us back to French President Macron, who is pushing Europe towards space independence, which for him also means priority for European companies.

“We must fully embrace the principle of European favoritism. It is not a dirty word or protectionism, but a refusal to be naive,” Macron said in Paris.

He also demanded that European public demand be directed even more strongly to European space companies.

As a Finn and a European, the idea can be supported if the implementation does not mean only favoring the largest French and German companies.

Like the one who attended the Paris Summit Photo by Space managing director Jarkko Antila stated: “The European space industry should offer more opportunities to new entrants.”

According to Antila, public procurement should be opened to a wider group of actors than at present. In addition, competition should be increased, especially in the defense and security sector.

Macron’s big vision is also to achieve an independent European manned space flight, because otherwise the old continent will fall even further behind in the space race with the United States, China and Russia.

Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA). Josef Aschbacher urged European countries in Paris to increase funding for Esa, which plans space flights. According to him, an annual additional investment of one billion euros for the next ten years would enable Europe to send astronauts into space without depending on the services of the Americans.

Kauppalehti asked Aschbacher after the summit how Esa’s 23 member countries reacted to the matter. The director general of Esa replied that “the message was positive”, which means that Esa is starting to prepare the matter, which should be given a political decision in December in Rome.

Finland is also a member of Esa, and although Finland does not yet have an official position on the matter, the Minister of Defense still does Antti Häkkänen (kok) said in Paris in his own opinion that “go there”.

However, the two-day event organized under the glass dome of the Grand Palais in Paris proved that Europe is not yet investing enough to reduce its dependence on the United States for access to space.

Now that the situation is known, European countries should open the money taps, but that is easier said than done.

President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen said in Paris that, according to the Commission’s proposal, a total of 131 billion euros would be allocated to defense, security and space activities in the upcoming multiannual budget. However, the amount may still melt when the member states and the parliament start arguing about where the shared funds should be allocated in the end.

Fortunately, companies are awake and working. In connection with the summit, companies in the space industry announced new partnerships and investments worth billions of euros.

Otherwise, there was a positive atmosphere among the entrepreneurs of the large growth sector.

Among other things, Iceye’s satellite mission business director Steve Young considered the Paris space summit “very fruitful” because the meeting brought together a large concentration of customers, authorities and military delegations in Paris, and according to Young, new contract announcements are likely to come as well.

The only negative meeting comments I heard during dozens of different meetings were related to the meeting arrangements, which were admittedly messy, and the fact that the European space talk overemphasizes US dominance.

Many experts reminded that Europe has been a major player in space for decades. Expertise can be found, for example, in earth observation, navigation systems and space research.

Many people may not know, for example, that when we use GPS, we are actually using the European Galileo system, which is used in more than 4.5 billion devices worldwide and almost entirely in Europe. Galileo guides people, cars and planes. It also provides the precise timing on which European financial systems and power grids, among other things, depend. It’s just still called the gps system, because the system works together with the gps, and for some reason the American version of the name survived.

At the same time, it must be recognized that Europe has really lagged behind the United States in the launch market and satellite communication. Europe has also had to rely on the United States for manned flights.

We are now trying to correct these shortcomings. It will succeed if there is enough political will and the importance of space is understood.

As Esa’s CEO stated, satellite services are part of people’s daily lives from morning to night: satellites are needed for weather forecasting, navigation, bank payment transactions and crisis management, among other things. They are also used in monitoring natural disasters, air traffic, maritime traffic, and security and defense tasks.

According to many experts I interviewed, a similar gray war or hybrid influence is going on in space, which is also seen on earth, and Europe must also prepare for this.

As a final note, I can say that I was a little surprised that I was the only Finnish reporter at the historic space summit in Paris. This shows that the ever-growing importance of space is not yet understood even in Finland.

On the other hand, the situation offered a unique moment when the president of the republic came to say hello holding hands and said: “I didn’t know you were spaced out too” (in the moonlight).