Europe has the chance to make a “quantum leap” in space technology over the coming years and boost its defences, but only if the EU stops wasting years on “grand schemes”, Airbus Space and Defence CEO Michael Sch\u00f6llhorn told Euronews. <\/p>\n
The continent risks falling further behind in space unless it moves quickly from planning to action, Sch\u00f6llhorn said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a gap when it comes to what I call active space defence, being able to act, protect, and counteract in space against adversaries that want to do something to our infrastructures, to our satellites,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
The European Commission has pitched a so-called Space Shield as part of its Defence Readiness Roadmap, which aims to significantly bolster the bloc’s ability to defend itself before 2030.<\/p>\n
Space is seen as crucial to that effort, notably when it comes to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance as well as fast and secure communication. Strategic enablers, which include space assets, are now designated a priority area for investment by the European Commission.<\/p>\n
For Sch\u00f6llhorn, one of the problems that explains the space capability gap is one of scale, with European companies much smaller than their US counterparts. He attributes this to governments under-investing over the last several decades due to a lack of understanding about the strategic importance of space.<\/p>\n
‘A quantum leap’ before 2030<\/p>\n
The Commission’s plan to rearm Europe aims to secure \u20ac800 billion of investment in the sector before 2030, especially in the nine priority areas that include strategic enablers, ammunition, air and missile defence, and drones.<\/p>\n
Germany, which has opted against using any of the financial instruments the EU’s executive has come up with to boost defence spending, has announced a \u20ac500 billion package for the next four years, including \u20ac35 billion for military space defence. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat the Americans have always had is a budget at least 10 times (the size of the EU’s). Even with everything that the Europeans are spending now, there’s still at least three times higher budget in the US than compared to Europe \u2013 and that doesn’t even take into account all the things that we call ‘black programmes’,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Airbus, Leonardo and Thales signed a Memorandum of Understanding in October 2025 to form a major joint venture that will merge their respective space activities into a single European space company. But even after joining forces, the resulting company would only be the fourth biggest in the world behind Lockheed Martin, SpaceX and Boeing, Sch\u00f6llhorn said.<\/p>\n
Still, he is upbeat about Europe’s ability to catch up fast, telling Euronews that European industry will ultimately have the means and the capacity to meet the demand from member states.<\/p>\n
“It depends again on the system, but I think before the decade\u2019s over, we can have a quantum leap in terms of capability building,\u201d he said \u2013 while warning that this can only happen if authorities provide industry with “practical definitions of programmes and solutions” so that companies can get started. <\/p>\n
‘Grand schemes on paper are worth nothing’<\/p>\n
Sch\u00f6llhorn also warned that excessive bureaucracy could undermine those ambitions, calling for the “unwinding” or “curbing back” of some regulations, and to rethink outdated rules that he said are no longer adapted because they were set up “when the world was totally different”.<\/p>\n
The way the EU went about defining its Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS\u00b2) project “was an example of how not to do it”, he said. <\/p>\n
IRIS\u00b2 is a planned multi-orbital constellation of 290 satellites that aims to support a large variety of governmental applications in surveillance, crisis management, connection and protection of key infrastructures as well as security and defence that was approved in 2024.<\/p>\n
It is meant to be the EU’s improved version of Elon Musk’s Starlink, but is well behind that system’s progress.<\/p>\n
“Well, Starlink is on its third iteration,” Sch\u00f6llhorn said. “We, excuse me for saying it so clearly, thought politically so arrogantly that we can surpass them in one go in a few years. That’s not a good definition of a programme.”<\/p>\n
Instead, he said, the EU should have acted fast by using what was already available and then building on that.<\/p>\n
IRIS\u00b2 is now expected to be operational in 2029.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, Sch\u00f6llhorn said, Europe must prioritise concrete action over lofty ambitions. “Grand schemes on paper are worth nothing,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Europe has the chance to make a “quantum leap” in space technology over the coming years and boost…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259123,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[6776,1403,98111,2487,111,139,69,147,392,1504],"class_list":{"0":"post-259122","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-airbus","9":"tag-defence","10":"tag-eu-policy","11":"tag-european-union","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-space","17":"tag-starlink"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}