Credit: ESA / J. Van de Vel
European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher unveiled the European Resilience from Space programme on Tuesday in Brussels. The initiative aims to pool national space assets and develop new capabilities in intelligence, surveillance, secure communications, and navigation to strengthen Europe’s resilience and autonomy in the face of emerging security threats. It is expected to have a budget of €1 billion.
“In this moment of rapid change, there is a critical need to synchronise European initiatives by aligning space for defence competencies, avoiding duplication and pooling resources for scale,” explained Aschbacher. “We still remain too fragmented to guarantee Europe genuine, comprehensive, and autonomous space resilience. We have an opportunity to change that, and we must.”
In his address, Aschbacher explained that the European Resilience from Space (ERS) programme would lay the groundwork for a future European initiative to be funded under the next EU Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), the bloc’s long-term budget plan, which the European Commission is currently preparing. However, as the budget will not be approved until 2028, ESA’s early involvement is essential to ensure the programme can be rapidly deployed once funding is allocated. The capabilities developed under the ESA programme would eventually be handed over to an as-yet-undefined “operational entity.”
The first capability to be developed under the European Resilience from Space programme will be an Earth observation component (ERS-EO), which will feed directly into the European Commission’s planned Earth Observation Government Services (EOGS) initiative, a project expected to begin in 2028 following approval of the next EU MFF. This element of the programme will account for the bulk of the total budget, with €750 million allocated to the ERS-EO initiative.
According to Aschbacher, under the ERS-EO component, the agency aims to develop a persistent, all-weather, real-time capability with a high revisit time of under 30 minutes. One of the ways the agency aims to achieve this, especially the high revisit time, is by pooling national capabilities, such as the joint Portuguese–Spanish Atlantic Constellation and Poland’s CAMILA constellation. Participating nations would retain control over their own assets but could make excess capacity available to others on an in-kind basis. This pooled capacity will be complemented by data from the EU’s existing Copernicus Earth observation constellation and by new satellites developed under the programme, the first of which could be launched as early as 2028.
A second component under the ERS programme is Navigation (ERS-Nav), which will receive €250 million. ERS-Com, the communications element, will encompass additional work for the IRIS2 programme, the EU’s initiative to develop a secure satellite communications network in low Earth orbit, providing member states with a sovereign European alternative to Starlink.
While the broad outlines of the ERS programme have been agreed, Aschbacher acknowledged during a press conference following the event in Brussels that few details have yet been defined. He said the European Commission is expected to provide high-level requirements by November ahead of ESA’s Ministerial Council meeting in Bremen, with more detailed specifications to follow early next year.