“The greatness of France demands its presence in space. » In 1961, aware of the strategic importance of the cosmos, General de Gaulle set the country the objective of becoming the third space power, after the Russians and the Americans. An ambition that will lead to the successful launch of the Ariane rocket program, ten years later, guaranteeing Europe its sovereignty, by giving it its own access to space.
But, today, this autonomy is threatened, for lack of launchers. The future Ariane-6 is already more than three years late, its maiden launch having been postponed to the last quarter of 2023. Its little sister Vega-C missed its first commercial launch on December 20 and had to be destroyed in flight. The missions will resume once the causes of the failure have been analyzed and the corrective action has been taken.
Arianespace, the company that markets and manages flights, will therefore find itself for several months without a new rocket. Private customers are likely to turn to American or Indian launchers. The prolonged absence of a European solution would complicate the task of governments, which do not want to entrust the putting into orbit of military satellites to foreign firms.
The ambition of space Europe to stay in the race against the Americans and the Chinese is seriously called into question. Its operating model too, since space, a domain long reserved for large national agencies, was shaken up by Elon Musk. With SpaceX and its Falcon rockets, the American billionaire has been imposing his rules there for ten years. Everything is faster, cheaper, and its rockets are reusable.
The question of “geographical return”
This agility contrasts with the heaviness of European processes, often a source of delays and additional costs. Faced with the SpaceX offensive, the European Space Agency (ESA) reacted by launching, in December 2014, the Ariane-6 and Vega-C programs. But it did so without changing its organization and above all by maintaining its “geographical return” rule, a practice consisting in reallocating an industrial burden to each State equivalent to its financial contribution. A country can thus obtain that one of its companies participate in a project, even if it is not the most efficient in its field. This also allows it to acquire technologies, as was the case for Germany and Italy against France.
This rule is increasingly cumbersome in the face of the multiple projects of start-ups and especially American billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Especially since initiatives are multiplying, requiring rapid reactions.
Last example: the diffusion of high-speed Internet from space. Elon Musk has established himself with his constellation of Starlink satellites. By making it available to Ukrainians, from the start of the war against Russia, and now to Iranian society in revolt, he demonstrates the vital importance of such a communication tool.
In response, so as not to depend on a private actor and to be autonomous, the European Union announced in mid-November the launch of its own ultra-secure network, called Iris².
In order to keep to a very tight schedule providing for the commissioning of this constellation from 2027, Brussels has decided to forego the “geographic feedback” of ESA in its calls for tenders, in favor of the technical competence of manufacturers, innovation and efficiency. A first, which must imperatively be a success and become the standard applicable to all space programs. European sovereignty is at stake.