Europe between autonomy and dependence

Four years after the invasion of Ukraine, Europe is managing a radical transformation of its space posture. The change is first and foremost cultural: space is no longer seen as a purely scientific field or an economic tool, but as a strategic nexus linking foreign policy, defense and technological sovereignty. The repositioning of space on public agendas thus responds to the need to have one’s own assets available when and where necessary—an objective pursued throughout the history of European space cooperation that has now become decisive in a rapidly changing international context. Reducing a structural dependence that has for decades left the continent vulnerable to the decisions of others is now a strategic priority.

The recent European Space Conference (ESC) in Brussels, following on from the European Space Agency (ESA) Ministerial Council of November 2025—where member states made record subscriptions—signals a renewed willingness to invest in space. In terms of launch vehicles—the rockets that carry satellites and payloads into orbit—Ariane 6, with its four-booster version (A64) already operational for large-scale commercial launches, and the revival of Vega-C, are restoring Europe’s independent access to space after years of stagnation. Galileo is fully operational, with new cutting-edge services, poised to launch the PRS signal for government and military activities, and already looking towards the second generation. Copernicus is undergoing an expansion essential to maintaining leadership in environmental and climate monitoring; decisions to pursue new observation programs for government and security use, within the EU and ESA, promise to fill certain gaps and strengthen the tools available. Finally, the announcement of Govsatcom’s operational status marks a long-awaited milestone in ensuring secure and sovereign communications for all member states, pending developments on IRIS2 (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite) by 2030.

The transatlantic imbalance

Viewed from the outside, the picture might appear to be that of a mature space power. Yet the reality is more complex, with several areas where the path to autonomy is anything but straightforward. Statements from European leaders at the Brussels Conference highlight the need to make a quantum leap on the fronts where dependencies are most exposed. The proposed budget of EUR 131 billion in the next Multiannual Financial Framework is unprecedented and combines space and defense into a single package, building on initiatives announced at the ESC by Andrius Kubilius, the European Commissioner for Defense and Space, such as the European Space Shield and the Virtual Space Command—a central hub currently missing from the European architecture, and one already floated in January 2022 by the previous Commissioner, Thierry Breton. 

In intelligence, early warning, reactive launch capabilities and space domain awareness, autonomy is far from being achieved. A transatlantic imbalance persists, which more broadly reflects a shift toward U.S. strategic vocabulary: Europe is trying to adapt to that lexicon, ultimately measuring itself against American standards that only amplify a wider technological gap. The Draghi Report on competitiveness had already pointed to the need to reduce external dependencies and strategic vulnerabilities by intervening at the base of the value chain for critical raw materials and charting a course toward a genuine single space market and the coordination of public spending. The debate surrounding the proposed European Space Act sometimes seems to overlook these elements, ignoring the need to move beyond a status quo locked in by the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon.

Among the many issues raised by the debate on autonomy and dependence, the connectivity sector is the most contentious. Starlink continues to prove its importance in Ukraine, especially following new measures restricting its unauthorized use by Russian troops, and underscoring the urgency of ensuring a distributed, secure, reliable and available command-and-control system. Its private nature, subject to the discretion of a single actor, has long been a source of concern for European institutions. However, the Brussels Conference cast more shadows than light on IRIS²: while the program is claimed to be superior to Starlink, industry representatives describe its governance as a textbook example of how not to do things. This skewed perception masks the risk of confusing commercial competitiveness with strategic necessity, pursuing a model that is difficult to replicate.

The unresolved issues raised in Brussels, however, are not merely technological, nor are they entirely attributable to global dynamics. The first and most fundamental concerns the nature of the impetus for change. The push toward European sovereignty in space is largely externally driven: dictated by American disengagement, the war in Ukraine, and competition between major powers—not by a mature internal will. All the more so because, while the current strategic repositioning of space is being driven by external factors, the deepest and most decisive challenges for resolving questions of autonomy are purely internal. Numerous concerns have emerged at the ESC regarding bureaucracy, inefficient governance, intra-European competition and national pressures. While the latter are necessary for building European and NATO pooling-and-sharing capabilities—provided they are implemented with a focus on interoperability—they can also fragment European action and render it futile. 

Lessons from the past

From this perspective, how can we avoid the pitfalls of dependence and irrelevance? How should we interpret the tension between centrifugal forces and European integration? These questions draw on lessons from the past and answers painstakingly arrived at over more than sixty years of European cooperation.

As early as May 1966, a Round Table organized by the Institute of International Affairs highlighted Europe’s structural weaknesses in space cooperation. While praising the multilateral effort to pool respective financial, technical and industrial resources—a feature unique on the global stage—the experts described space cooperation as plagued by fragmentation across sectoral bodies, by sometimes conflicting objectives, and by the absence of a common space policy and effective coordination. The assessment was harsh: inevitable waste of resources and duplication of effort, a lack of program and institutional stability, and the absence of effective cooperation with the United States. Italy, in particular, was championing pioneering initiatives for the reorganization, coordination and integration—and even the merger—of existing bodies.

That assessment was borne out over the following decade. The split between ELDO (European Launcher Development Organisation), responsible for launchers, and ESRO (European Space Research Organisation), dedicated to scientific research, had become emblematic of organizational paralysis and of a vision structurally incapable of producing results. Separate mandates and a lack of coordination led to inefficiencies and serious management errors, in a pre-ESA context where discussions were already underway about moving past the “geo-return” and establishing a European preference. Repeated crises, triggered by withdrawals and disengagements by France, the United Kingdom and Italy, sealed the failure of that model. What followed was a period marked both by individual national programs—particularly in telecommunications, such as the Italian Sirio program—and by the founding phase of the ESA, which was finally able to implement the governance and industrial policy reforms debated over the preceding fifteen years, with the aim of strengthening a heavily fragmented European industry.

A global strategic necessity

Today, as in the 1960s, certain questions naturally arise: will fragmentation prevail? Do centrifugal forces or European integration carry more weight? The success stories that allow Europe to boast world-class infrastructure today show that, despite resistance, integration has prevailed when driven by a desire for autonomy and seen as a global strategic necessity.

Even more than Copernicus—although it was conceived as a tool for climate and environmental information sovereignty—the Galileo program represents the perfect synthesis of this trajectory. Proposed in the 1990s for civilian purposes, it has its roots in the desire to acquire independent capabilities to influence global issues. Its history is marked by the tension between market logic and political ambitions, and by the rifts among European states that prioritized commercial viability and the preservation of the status quo with the United States over visions of autonomy—anticipating the now decade-long debate on how open or closed strategic autonomy should be, a debate introduced in 2016 by the EU Global Strategy. Finally, in 2007, the case for a Galileo conceived as a sovereignty project prevailed. From that trajectory a lesson emerges that still holds today: it is no longer merely a matter of responding and reacting to external shocks, but of ensuring coherent implementation and providing concrete evidence of European ambitions, given the capabilities available.

It is in this light that the recent establishment of Bromo should be viewed: a new joint venture between Airbus, Thales and Leonardo for the integration of satellite activities and space services, announced in the fall of 2025. Its significance is not merely industrial: Bromo is, potentially, the kind of bottom-up collaboration that can help overcome institutional inertia, steering national approaches toward a European horizon, and at the very least helping to consolidate domestic demand.

Its success, however, depends on two conditions that map directly onto the key issues identified at the outset. The first is the speed of European decision-making: the industrial project will take around two years to become operational. The second is, once again, the availability of adequate domestic demand—the very issue the Draghi Report had identified as a priority and that the institutional debate continues to put off. It is a difficult balance, held together by constant course corrections and negotiations rather than by the prospect of structural consensus. Europe has the tools to take on these challenges, but the timeframe is tighter than in the 1960s and the cost of irrelevance is higher.