The European Space Agency (ESA) will in November ask its member countries to contribute “roughly €1 billion” for the development of a military-grade reconnaissance satellite network, the organisation’s director general, Josef Aschbacher, told Euractiv.
The funding plan will see ESA work on an EU programme that aims to help militaries and governments counter threats and manage natural disasters by beaming ultra-high-resolution optical imagery back to Earth at intervals of under 30 minutes.
“Strategically, it is very important because it’s really dedicated to a new group of users, that means security and defence users,” said Aschbacher, speaking on the sidelines of the European Space Policy Institute’s annual conference in Vienna.
The bloc’s other space programmes, such as Galileo, a GPS alternative for geo-navigation, and Copernicus, which is used to monitor the effects of climate change, are principally used for civilian purposes.
Aschbacher said the reconnaissance constellation will be part of a total €22 billion budget request from ESA over the next three years. The details will be hammered out at a funding summit next month in Bremen, with capitals asked to contribute to various programmes.
Once considered a “forbidden” topic for the Paris-based ESA, which was founded in the 1970s to pursue projects for peaceful purposes, Aschbacher said the agency’s 22 countries have agreed that defence projects should be included to bolster security.
“It does not need a change in our convention because we discussed this at length last year; the wording ‘peaceful purposes’ is really interpreted for defence,” said Aschbacher. “The best proof of [capitals] accepting the interpretation is that they asked me to table a programme.”
The European Commission calls the new military satellite system the Earth Observation governmental service, or EOGS, while ESA calls it European Resilience from Space.
Separately, the EU is currently considering how to allocate its space spending in the seven-year budget running from 2028 to 2034.
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