Example impression of Sentinel-2. Image courtesy of ESA. Copyright ESA/ATG medialab.
The ripples of the global pandemic are being felt by the European Earth Observation (EO), and wider, space industry as the leaders of the twenty-seven European Union (EU) countries agreed a € 750 billion stimulus package to support their countries to recover from the COVID pandemic within an overall revised Euro € 1.8 trillion budget.
As a consequence of the additional funding for COVID recovery, cuts have been made to other parts of the European Union’s budget including space. At the end of last year, it was expected that the space budget would be Euro 16 billion for the next seven years. However, the additional impact of COVID together with concerns from some Member States over the loss of the UK funding has led to two sperate cuts to the budget meaning that for the next seven years the space budget is set at a maximum of €13.2 billion.
The main focus of this funding will be on the Galileo and Copernicus satellite programs, with Galileo receiving 60.60% and Copernicus receiving 36.44% of the money. The remaining budget will cover several other projects such as secure satellite communications for EU members and a European space situational awareness project.
There is an interesting comment being reported from Pierre Lionnet, research director at Eurospace which is a trade group representing European space companies, who noted that the EU have given the lion’s share money to Galileo because he felt that Europeans are more aware of Galileo and its benefits than of Copernicus. It is an unsurprising statement, but still a damning one for the EO industry.
Whilst Galileo’s principle of satellite navigation may be better known as an application, a lot of Europeans are just as likely to be using GPS rather Galileo to do the work. Whereas people will see Copernicus images daily on news and weather forecasts, but we’ve still not got the connection with the public.
To be fair, the UK Government has operated from a similar viewpoint. There has been a huge debate over the loss of access to Galileo following Brexit, leading to the recent investment in OneWeb and continued insistence we’ll develop our own satellite navigation system – despite most industry people indicating it would be far too expensive deliver effectively.
Whereas on Copernicus … almost nothing! There have been discussions within the industry and between industry and Government. Even though UK Companies made a huge contribution to the programme, the Government has not announced that the UK will be establishing its own EO constellation as a sovereign asset, although there has been a recent proposal call for the new National Space Innovation Programme that includes EO to tackle climate change.
Everyone within the EO industry is searching for that breakthrough application, which will move EO from the niche industry to the mainstream one, the problem is we’ve been doing that for many years already! There are signs that satellite data is becoming more commonplace within industry, but this tends to be within a large application and the satellite data is simply an input data source and does not always get the recognition of its role.
Many people within the industry will say that this is right, and people should not care where the data comes from so long as it delivers what the customers what. We’d agree with that principle, but as Pierre’s comments show, sometimes this does not help put satellites into the public consciousness.
Whilst it’s obvious welcome that the EU is still putting a significant budget in EO, it is something the industry needs to think about again in terms of how we promote ourselves and get into the public’s awareness.
