The Times: Brussels starts countdown to sideline Britain from Galileo
The European Union has taken the first step to creating its own space agency that would sideline Britain after Brexit and seal the control of Brussels over civil and military satellite systems such as Galileo. The power grab comes as the European Commission uses Brexit to push Britain to the margins of Europe’s satellite industry, which is increasingly significant for military and commercial uses.
David Davis, the Brexit secretary, yesterday accused the EU of putting dogma before security by pushing Britain out of the Galileo satellite programme, with military capabilities Britain had helped pay for and design. “The commission’s position seems to be shooting itself in the foot just to prove the gun works,” he said.......
Jan Wörner, director-general of the European Space Agency (ESA), a non-EU inter-governmental organisation that includes the UK as well as Canada and Norway, has protested that the commission’s proposals would be costly, divisive and bureaucratic. “Europe, this is to say at least the EU, ESA and their respective member states together, must join forces,” Dr Wörner wrote on his blog. “There is no need to develop a new space agency in parallel in Europe, the ramp-up of which would take decades and cost billions and would therefore in itself be a major risk to the programmes it manages. We need to streamline, not double administrative layers.”
Under proposals published yesterday, the EU would directly control the civil-military Galileo and Copernicus satellite projects after 2020, potentially relegating the ESA to a technical and advisory role. The EU has rejected a British demand for access to Galileo’s heavily encrypted Public Regulated Service signal, used for military purposes, on grounds of security. The plan envisages control of the satellite projects becoming an “EU agency for the space programme” with powers to “ensure the security of all the components of the programme” by ensuring key contracts are only issued to EU member states.
Commission officials dismissed Dr Wörner’s comments as “unfounded”. “The security component is increasingly important,” a commission official said in reference to Britain’s exclusion from the military elements of Galileo.
Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy researcher at Leicester University, said: “Brexit seems to be accelerating the process of dovetailing ESA into EU space policy. This institutional action and its name shows that having a big member [the UK] in the ESA that is able to threaten to complicate the governance of EU-funded space projects seems to have increased the desire of the EU to increase its governing muscle in European space policy.”.......