HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The European Space Agency has provided more details about the multi-pronged security program it is seeking more than one billion euros for at its upcoming ministerial conference.
At the European Resilience from Space Conference in Brussels on Oct. 28, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher detailed the European Resilience from Space (ERS) program, announced earlier this year. The program would include imaging, navigation and communications capabilities for security-related uses ranging from defense to crisis response.
The program is driven by growing security threats to Europe, particularly from Russia, as well as the perception that the continent can no longer rely primarily on the United States for defense.
“In this moment of rapid change, there is a critical need to synchronize European initiatives by aligning space for defense competencies, avoiding duplication and pooling resources for scale,” Aschbacher said in prepared remarks. “We still remain too fragmented to guarantee Europe genuine, comprehensive and autonomous space resilience.”
ERS is one of the cornerstone proposals in the package ESA will present to its member states at the Nov. 26–27 ministerial conference in Bremen, Germany. Aschbacher said at an Oct. 23 briefing after an ESA Council meeting that he was seeking “a bit above one billion” euros for ERS.
In an online briefing during the Brussels conference, he said the program has a total value of 1.2 billion euros ($1.4 billion).
The largest component is in Earth observation, where ESA is proposing to spend 750 million euros to begin developing a constellation of imaging satellites. That effort will start with a “virtual” system combining existing satellites operated by individual European countries.
“We start with pooling and sharing existing capabilities,” he said. “If some satellite systems are used at 30% to 40% of their capacity for national needs, the other 60% could be utilized by others, in exchange for other countries doing the same.”
That approach, however, would not be enough to meet Europe’s needs. The combined national systems could provide about a dozen images of specific locations per day, Aschbacher said, while “what you really want is a very high frequency of observation: every 30 minutes.”
Meeting that goal will require a new constellation of optical and radar imaging satellites, potentially incorporating other sensors such as thermal infrared or radio-frequency monitoring systems, as well as technologies like edge computing and intersatellite links. ESA’s goal is to launch the first demonstration satellites by 2028.
ESA is also seeking 250 million euros for LEO PNT, a low Earth orbit constellation of positioning, navigation and timing satellites that would augment the Galileo system and increase resilience against interference.
The third component focuses on communications, building on the IRIS² secure connectivity constellation. Laurent Jaffart, ESA’s director of connectivity and secure communications, said 50 million euros would fund early-phase studies and 150 million euros would support demonstrations. That funding is part of a broader 600 million euro request for IRIS² at the ministerial.
“ERS Earth observation will run in parallel with the definition of the IRIS² evolution,” Jaffart said. “We’re looking at IRIS² as the secure communication backbone for all Earth observation missions, and also for the PNT missions.”
The funding ESA is requesting for ERS represents only the first step in developing a full system in partnership with the European Commission, Aschbacher said. “The ERS development and investments are a precursor or first pilot, the first tangible deliverable on the ESA side to a joint undertaking that we will build up together with the European Commission.”
ERS would follow the model of past partnerships between ESA and the European Commission, such as Galileo and Copernicus, in which ESA leads development and the commission manages operations.
Those later phases have not yet been defined. Earlier this year, the European Commission proposed spending 131 billion euros on a “competitiveness fund” for defense and space in its next seven-year multiannual financial framework (MFF) beginning in 2028. How much of that would go to space, including ERS, remains unclear.
The timing of ESA’s ministerial conference is “perfect,” Aschbacher said, as it allows work on early ERS development to begin while the commission finalizes its next MFF. “ESA is needed to step in and take on some of the challenges in this very fast-moving environment,” he said.
However, Aschbacher acknowledged that European autonomy in space security has limits. Asked whether ERS satellites would be “ITAR-free,” meaning they would not rely on U.S. components subject to export controls, he said that was unlikely.
“Having a completely ITAR-free satellite for Europe is very much desirable, but I think very far away from reality,” he said.
