How it works: Europe in space
437 views · Published 13 November 2012 · 4:11 · Indexed 30 October 2026
Channel: European Parliament · 2012 · News & Politics
Three, two, one, zero. Liftoff. And that's one more. This rocket taking off from Kourou in French Guiana placed two new satellites in orbit. These will allow Europeans to have their own GPS soon. It's the Galileo project. We're in a replica of one of the European cargo vehicles that supply the International Space Station. This vehicle is sent into space once a year from Kourou in French Guiana. It's true that Galileo has been delayed, but it should still compete with the American GPS. It's one of the two flagship projects of European space policy. Galileo should be fully functional in 2020 when its 30 satellites have been placed in space. The system will have multiple applications: vehicle navigation, air safety, plus many commercial applications in the banking sector or geology. The European Union's other major space project is GMES. The idea is to build up a huge network to monitor the environment and security. GMES should be fully effective in 2014. So the European Union in space is no longer a dream, it's reality. Hello, Frank De Winne. -Hello. You're one of the few people lucky enough to go into space. That was in 2009 and you're now head of the European Astronaut Centre. Europeans started launching rockets and satellites decades ago, but in reality space policy has only been European for a few years. Actually, the European policy for space was already born with ESA. ESA is our European Space Agency and for the last 30 years the members of ESA have produced a European space policy. They have launched satellites and built launchers. But now with the Lisbon Treaty the European Union has also acquired some competences in space policy and so they're helping us to provide even better services to our citizens. You mentioned ESA. Let's watch a short video to refresh our memories. ESA, the European Space Agency, was founded in 1975. Completely independent of the EU at the start, it's more an intergovernmental organisation. It has 20 member states today which are not all members of the European Union. The successes of the Ariane rocket and Meteosat finally convinced the EU to cooperate with ESA on certain projects from 2000 onwards. Technological competence and political legitimacy seem complementary. So the European space policy is 4 billion euros for the period 2007-2014, plus 4 billion just for the Galileo programme and 3 billion more funded by the member states of ESA. That's a lot of money. In absolute terms, you could say it's a lot of money, about 4.5 billion euros per year. But if you see this as only 10 euros per European citizen per year, it's not a lot of money for everything we get back. If you compare to other space agencies, for example, we're spending only one-tenth of what the US is spending in space. There's also Russia and China, so there's a lot of competition. The Europe of 27, soon to be 28, seems to have taken on board the issues of space policy. In 2011, the European Commission put forward some new priorities. Competitiveness, independence, and quality of life for European citizens. But will the European Union one day send its own astronauts into space? At the moment, as we've seen, ESA does that. But in any case we're not likely to see a European astronaut on Mars soon. EuroparlTV video ID: 625e6827-5bb0-4944-a3af-a0fa00c7b499
