The European Parliament voted in favor of a large envelope of 2.4 billion euros to develop and implement the new european constellation IRIS². The latter will provide governments, public and emergency services with a seamless connectivity solution.
Sometimes presented as a competitor to Starlink, it will be mainly present to prevent administrations from using the American network, and to provide a more secure service.
The Union wants to connect
“It’s an essential capacity that Europe does not have and that IRIS² will provide”, explained European Commissioner Thierry Breton on 14 February. The constellation of European connectivity, he has been defending it for more than a year, so much so that it has sometimes been called ” Brittany Constellation “. But, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, European officials have had plenty of time to see how indispensable Starlink, the connectivity constellation offered by SpaceX, has become indispensable not only on the front line, but also and above all, in regions cut off from the world by the bombings.
A situation of dependence on an American company, and even more, on the radical decisions of its founder, Elon Musk. And a concern for the European Union, which sees the risk of generalizing this solution for public services, sometimes critical, in Europe and elsewhere, at the same time as that of hacking infrastructures. This is the role of IRIS² (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite), which will provide communications ” global, ultra-secure and autonomous to governments and public services.
Avoiding Starlink, is it too late?
To achieve this before the use of other tools (including Starlink) becomes widespread, the European Union wants to equip itself with mechanisms to rapidly deploy its constellation. It will be able to count on the ESA, which has already put on the table an envelope of more than 700 million, but also on European industrialists who have been called upon several times for pre-projects last year. Because there is no question of using external service providers or worse, a subcontractor working for or with Russia: for the EU, the collaboration is over.
This will involve sending the first elements into orbit from 2024-2025, with a target of 170 satellites in low orbit by 2027, ensuring a global network. As we know, such a number of units will not be able to compete with the speeds offered by Starlink or its competitors, which offer thousands of satellites equipped with transponders and links between them or to ground stations… But this is not the objective, which is above all to have a backbone of European communication, with encryption and secure stations.
Quick contracts
The European Union also wants to innovate by setting up a form of public-private contract to accelerate the development of IRIS², with a share that will be directly entrusted to European SMEs and start-ups, and another that should take advantage of industrial forces. already in place. This is the case of quantum encryption technologies with projects such as TeQuantS awarded to Thales Alenia Space in January. Europe is therefore in the starting blocks before its own connectivity race.
Note that it is not the only one: if public attention is focused on large commercial projects such as those of SpaceX or OneWeb, it will be remembered that Russia also wishes to set up such a network for its government needs. , this is the Sfera project.
Source : space news
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