Space agency director thinks EU space law would have GDPR-style outsized impact

A European space law would have benefits that would ripple outside EU borders, Rodrigo da Costa, executive director at the EU Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) told Euractiv in an interview on Wednesday (24 April).

Space debris orbiting the Earth is a growing risk for functioning satellites. As of December 2023, the European Space Agency (ESA) estimated that there were a million pieces of debris in space measuring between one and ten centimetres. As their numbers increase, so does the threat of collision.

To tackle this sustainability challenge, as well as cybersecurity issues, the European Commission has been in the process of drafting an EU Space Law, expected to be released during the summer.

“As an agency, we provided our contributions on the law [to the European Commission] when we were asked,” explained da Costa.

Debris is “the most pressing issue,” said da Costa, adding that “there is certainly a need for creating common rules by European actors”.

Should rules on space debris be regulated in the EU, da Costa believes that EU citizens, but also citizens worldwide would benefit from it.

“I think there is something really powerful in the EU, which I call, in my own words, the ‘GDPR effect’,” he said, referring to the EU data privacy regulation introduced in 2018.

Despite complaints that the GDPR would be “too complex” before its enforcement, companies now “end up using more or less the same approach everywhere in the world,” da Costa explained.

A similar effect to the GDPR should take place in the sustainability and cybersecurity of the space sector thanks to this new EU Space law, said the EUSPA director.

Constellations protection

Galileo, the European constellation of GPS satellites, “is cyber-protected,” he said. EUSPA is doing “24/7 security monitoring of Galileo, and taking action, whenever necessary, to mitigate any risk of intrusion or attack”.

Yet, the biggest assets under Galileo’s protection are not in space, but on the ground, he said. These ground facilities have “the biggest value”, he said.

“They are in EU member states or in countries that have an agreement with the European Union, and there are clear agreements and obligations of the corresponding member to protect these assets,” said the director.

Reacting to Enrico Letta’s high-level report

In response to former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta’s claim that there is a need to clarify the roles of EUSPA and ESA, da Costa said the two space agencies have so far been working efficiently.

One of the main financial contributors to the ESA is the United Kingdom, which left the EU in 2020, Letta wrote in his strategic report presented last week, and this consequently complicated the establishment of a single European space agency within the perimeter of EU institutions.

But da Casto thinks the “way of working” of the two agencies on Galileo could be applied to other projects. “Whenever the European Space Agency is working for the EU space programme, it is working with EU rules in very different dimensions,” he said.

Letta further wrote in his report that the EU space industry needs integration.

But the “focus” should be on the integration of the space industry and other sectors, rather than the agencies, da Costa said.

To reap the full benefits of space, the industry “needs to move outside its little bubble of space experts and space travellers and space doers. The real value of space materialises in our economies: in transport, energy management, agriculture, forestry, fisheries etc,” he said.

“We need to push our actors to exchange more, integrate more […] and from an institutional point of view, we need a competent and competitive industry, both inside the EU market, but also outside the EU market.”

Space budget line in the next seven-year EU budget

In the current seven-year budget of the EU, the 2021-2027 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), €15 billion of public spending is dedicated to space activities.

Since then, and following the Russian war in Ukraine, the EU decided to launch a third satellite constellation dedicated to secure communication, IRIS2, in response to US SpaceLink in 2023.

The next MFF will need to take into account IRIS2, as its deployment should start in 2024 and should reach full capacity by 2027.

Asked how much the next long-term budget (2028-2034) should dedicate to space funding, da Costa replied that “the current €15 billion is the highest financing that the EU ever invested in space”.

[Edited by Eliza Gkritsi/Zoran Radosavljevic]

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