In Toulouse, Emmanuel Macron sets out to conquer space
In the presence of the President of the Republic, Europe decided during a space summit organized yesterday in Toulouse to acquire a sovereign constellation of 250 satellites to broadcast internet at very high speed.
Europe is back in space. This is the message that Emmanuel Macron sent on Wednesday during a space summit held in Toulouse in the presence of 27 European ministers. The President of the Republic has come to give major political impetus to relaunch the space ambitions of the European Union. “We are at a decisive moment for our space Europe,” he warned. A reference to the delay taken by the Old Continent in terms of satellite constellations and the space launcher market. Even if the new Ariane 6 has been secured, the Americans, in particular with Space X, have made “technological bets and have taken advantage of our divisions” a conceded Emmanuel Macron.
The Toulouse summit appears as a new chapter in European space history. It made it possible to achieve a first success: “We have a European political agreement to launch a new constellation of satellites. When I arrived in Toulouse, I thought the subject would be difficult, but a consensus quickly emerged,” announced Bruno Le Maire. In concrete terms, a constellation of 250 satellites launched into low orbit from 2024 will supply the entire world with very high speed internet. “And this signal will therefore be European and therefore sovereign” specified the Minister of the Economy who carried out all the negotiations yesterday.
Thousands of jobs for Toulouse
“Space is a necessary step in order to achieve this objective of sovereignty. Without mastery of space, there is no strategic, military or industrial sovereignty,” the President of the Republic lucidly noted. Providing Europe with this new constellation will make it possible not to depend on an American or Chinese signal to guide the autonomous cars of tomorrow, for example. And Toulouse will gain the creation of “thousands of jobs to assemble these satellites” named Bruno Le Maire. Jobs that will also benefit new start-ups in the space sector such as the Toulousain Loft Orbital cited by Emmanuel Macron during his speech. The President of the Republic also announced that France would support this constellation by allowing Europe to benefit from its priority frequency assignments.
On manned flights and the exploration of the Moon or Mars, Emmanuel Macron announced the creation of a group of high-level experts who will make proposals to European states. Concerning the regulation of space, the European Union adopts a legislative act in 2024 to manage traffic, debris but also new conflicts. Hear the savage attacks on satellites by foreign countries such as Russia in particular. The ambition will be to bring this European regulation to the planetary scale by convincing Americans, Chinese and Russians… This presidential trip of European dimension has left little room for the tricolor policy. The great elected officials of the region, Carole Delga and Jean-Luc Moudenc, took advantage of the presence of the president to defend files (tourism, industry and education for the president of the region and the number of magistrates for the mayor From toulouse).
Listening, the Elysée host simply displayed a photo with the students invited for the occasion but still slipped in a quote from Plato: “Astronomy forces the soul to look up high “. Undoubtedly, his gaze is well turned towards a new ambition, not spatial this time but political: the race for a second term.