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To do so it will have to drop old habits.
Dit artikel komt uit The Economist
Soldaten van het Oekraïense leger installeren een Starlink-satellietontvanger in de buurt van de frontlinie.
Recent days have made clear the folly of relying too much for your national security on a capricious private citizen named Elon Musk. Mr Musk is said to have ordered the partial hobbling of his satellite-internet service inside Ukraine. That had two malign effects. It hampered Ukraine’s already limited ability to defend its cities and civilians from fast and deadly Russian drones. It also made it harder for Ukraine to strike back at Russia’s occupying forces.
If President Donald Trump objected to this egregious favour to the Kremlin, he kept quiet about it. America’s allies, in Europe and elsewhere, may reasonably ask how much they can trust the superpower. If, in the future, they need space-based communications systems to defend themselves against attack, can they be absolutely certain that America will supply them unconditionally? The problem, alas, is that no adequate home-grown alternative exists. Europe talks a good game of trying to achieve „autonomy in space”. But that will take time and money, and also require Europe to cut the waste, infighting and duplication that have weighed down its space efforts.
How to get there? First, Europe must have the launch capacity to put large numbers of satellites into orbit. In this, its record so far is poor. It can lift heavy payloads into space on its Ariane rockets, but nowhere near as cheaply or efficiently as Mr Musk’s company does.
Europe’s rocket programme exemplifies flaws of its space ventures. Delays in developing its heavy-lift launcher, the Ariane 6, left Europe without access to space for almost a year in 2023 and 2024. The European Space Agency (ESA), which funds the programme, is partly to blame. It fails to award contracts to the most innovative or efficient suppliers, instead favouring firms from countries that donate the most funds. The programme is also shielded from market forces, getting roughly €300m ($337m) a year in public subsidies. Small wonder it has been trounced by SpaceX, which last year launched Falcon 9 rockets 165 times, charging private clients $70m a pop, while Ariane charges more than $90m despite those subsidies.
To fix this, the ESA is tentatively copying America’s space agency, NASA, which decades ago encouraged the growth of commercial space firms by switching from „cost-plus” contracts for developing rockets to buying fixed-price launch services, a policy that let Mr Musk’s SpaceX flourish. The agency has awarded contracts to three rocket startups. Mergers, such as the proposed tie-up of three of Europe’s biggest satellite-making businesses, could follow. But can Europe create a firm big enough to compete globally without reducing competition at home?
Europe’s second priority should be to create a rival to Mr Musk’s Starlink, and to do so without policies that drive up prices and stifle innovation. OneWeb, a firm part-owned by the British and French governments, already provides some services similar to Starlink’s. The European Union is going ahead with IRIS2, a €16bn project to deploy 348 satellites to provide secure communications to governments and armed forces. Yet even this suffers from fragmentation and duplication. Germany plans to build a swarm of 100 military-communications satellites at a cost of about €10bn, while France and Britain are investing in their own smaller programmes. It would be wiser for all to pool their demand for satellite services.
Some governments will insist on having such systems under national control. Yet their concerns could be met by building satellites to common standards, so that they are interoperable. Countries or blocs could own these, but by linking them together, all would benefit: larger fleets would mean more resilience and greater coverage. Examples of this are already in orbit, such as small radar satellites built by Iceye, a Finnish firm. It offers customers a „federated model”, in which they can choose how much to share intelligence and co-ordinate where their satellites focus. Such an approach should encourage like-minded middle powers beyond Europe, such as Canada, Japan and South Korea, to co-operate too.
Europe need not stop there. The more it builds up its own space capabilities and shares them with America, the more convincingly it can show that an alliance of democracies is valuable. If so, despite Mr Trump’s instincts, America would have much to lose by holding its allies to ransom.
© 2026 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.
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