European Space Summit Seeks to Boost Competitiveness, Protect Environment & Launch Independent Human Spaceflight Program
PARIS (ESA PR) — European leaders will reaffirm plans to launch Europe on a world-leading trajectory during a high-level space summit to be held on 16 February in Toulouse, France.
Urgent action is needed to tackle the unprecedented societal, economic and security challenges faced by Europe – from the climate crisis and its consequences to threats to crucial infrastructure in space and on Earth.
Space has enormous untapped potential to help tackle these challenges and future crises, while simultaneously creating jobs and boosting innovation in the European space industry – and it is vital for Europe to catch up with other space-faring nations such as the US and China.
The space summit seeks to identify how best to proceed. It will consist of two parts chaired by the French Presidency of the European Union, who is also chairing the ESA Council at ministerial level, reflecting the close cooperation between the EU and ESA.
The first part will be an informal EU Competitive Council Meeting on Space, attended by government ministers and their representatives from EU member states. Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for the Internal Market in charge of space, and Josef Aschbacher, ESA Director General, are due to address the meeting.
The second part will be an ESA Council Meeting at ministerial level, attended by government ministers and their representatives from ESA Member States.
Leaders attending the space summit are due to discuss the EU strategy for secure connectivity and the EU strategy for space traffic management. They will also exchange views on ESA’s three “accelerators” identified by Josef Aschbacher, who has collaborated with a high-level advisory group to raise Europe’s space ambitions to the next level.
“Space for a green future” aims to use data gleaned from Earth observation to help Europe act to mitigate climate change. “Rapid and resilient crisis response” seeks to better use space data and intelligent interconnectivity in space to empower vital responses to crises on Earth and complements the EU’s strategy for secure connectivity. The “protection of space assets” will contribute to prevent damage to the European space infrastructure and any disruption to its economically vital infrastructures such as power supplies and communications links. It will contribute to a safer space and will be undertaken in collaboration with the EU’s strategy for space traffic management.
As part of its preparations for the future, ESA is also developing two “inspirators” to raise European ambitions in human space exploration and in the search for extra-terrestrial life.
Leaders at the summit will consider how best to prepare for the longer-term future. Human exploration is an essential sovereign capability among all the major space powers, except Europe. Creating the ability for European astronauts to explore space on board European vehicles developed through innovative partnerships with European space companies will ensure the future of Europe in space and provide Europeans with the same opportunities as the citizens of the other main spacefaring nations.
Josef Aschbacher said: “The societal challenges ahead of Europe are widespread, significant and urgent. Addressing them effectively will require bold decisions and dedicated efforts on multiple fronts. Space technologies, data and services are uniquely positioned to make a difference and provide a concrete response to present and upcoming challenges. We must act now and accelerate the use of space in Europe.”
The summit is a key milestone in the Agenda 2025 journey set out in March 2021. It follows an Intermediate Ministerial Meeting held in November 2021, where the three accelerators and two inspirators were first presented and endorsed by ESA Member States ministers through the “Matosinhos Manifesto”.
35 responses to “European Space Summit Seeks to Boost Competitiveness, Protect Environment & Launch Independent Human Spaceflight Program”
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Good luck. They need to stop micromanaging their economies if they want innovation.
The worlds micromanaged economies keep taking market share from the less regulated economies. As long as they succeed and we keep sliding behind, they’re not going to do that. Their best bet is simply copy Falcon, or wait to see if the Starship approach works, then copy that.
That is because we let them set high tariffs against U.S. goods while setting low tariffs on imports. For example U.S. autos imported into the EU have a 10% tariff, while European autos imported into the U.S. only have a 2.5% tariff. Raising U.S. tariffs to match those of other nations is one of the answers. In China its is 25% tariff on imported automobiles, plus they set their currency at a low exchange rate.
And it’s US corporations that ask for that arrangement. I agree, we need to match their import tariffs against ours, but you’ll get a huge backlash from corporate America if you actually tried that. Think about what would happen if the US Gov put a tariff on GM parts made in China imported to the US to match the price of parts made in the US?
Incorrect. As I posted evidence elsewhere, U.S. firms asked for tariff protection against foreign competition from the 1960’s and into the 1980’s. But the U.S. bought into “free trade theory” and insisted on continuing it’s free trade policy for geopolitical reasons, to keep European and Asian nations as allies against the Soviet Union, so they just gave up and went overseas.
Sure they would, now that they have spent decades investing in global supply chains as a result of past tariff policy by the government.
Yeah, I remember those years. It was the Regan admin that did that. The unions the Democrats opposed it, but the exit option to Asia killed the unions and the main funding source for the Democrats. Then they joined the party too under Clinton.
You really need to spend some time studying the history of Post World War international trade. It is sad that your partisanship blinds you to the data.
If there was even a grain of reality in what you are claiming than the Democrats should have supported President Trump’s attempts to return manufacturing to the United States by raising tariffs. Instead he was demonize for starting a “trade war” and rejecting “Free Trade”.
https://theconversation.com…
Trump’s trade war – what was it good for? Not much
October 26, 2020 7.59am EDT
For reference here is a chart from the St. Louis Federal Reserve on trade balances. Note how they peaked when the first round of GATT took effect and how their fall actually reversed under the Reagan Administration when the Japanese car makers started building plants in the U.S. under the threat of tariffs being imposed. Plants that used union labor.
https://research.stlouisfed…
I remember those years . The Reagan administration did that in its attempt to break labor unions. US companies were more then happy to either send work overseas for cheaper wages or to buy things over seas that use to be made in the US. Now we have no industrial complex at all except for the protected tidbits of the space and military groups (and pharma yes we protect that)
the joy of Clinton was he and the Clinton wing of the party got ont he bandwagon as well, except added socially liberal policies that fit the sensebilities…of the massive rich and well here we are
what jobs could not be exported the GOP let die with union busting. see the airlines.
glorious success
Seems you forget about the home electronics, television and steel industry that was seeking protection in the 1960’s under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Remember the invasion of the transistor radios and cheap televisions from Japan, the first American industries to fall?
Free Trade was a policy ALL Administrations followed starting with the Truman Administration pushing the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) in 1947 as part of its strategy to rebuild Europe and Japan following WWII, and then continued to economically isolate the Soviet Union during the Cold War. As such BOTH the Democratic and Republican Party share blame, both at the Executive and Congressional level.
not really. there is a difference between free trade and one way trade to benefit the upper class. During the reagan years the entire “restart the economy” theory became that we could find a new economy by moving goods production overseas, lower the cost and value of it and then lower the wages of people in the US who would not be all that affected because they could still buy cheap goods…all the while giving massive tax cuts to corporations who along with the cuts lowered wages for productivity but not to fear you can still afford the cheap goods
the casualty in all of this was both the American middle class, which was the tax engine of the country AND the notion of an industrial complex
here is the reality. MOST people in the US dont make the same effective dollars that someone in their job did in the 1980’s and yet they are several more times productive in that job
and along the way, we have no staying power as an industrial power…as well as seeing more and more people sink into effective poverty
on the other hand Musk, Jamie D and a few others make far more money then the folks who did their jobs did in the 80’s and are not really that much more productive
and you wonder why our power is waning
News flash, the largest collapse was under the Carter Administration after starting under the Nixon Administration when he dropped the Gold Standard as this chart from the World Economic Forum shows.Wages actually stabilized under the Reagan Administration and returned to their 1973 peak under President Trump before the Covid struck.
https://www.weforum.org/age…
50 years of US wages, in one chart
Elon Musk’s net worth in 1960’s dollars is around $15 billion, his reward for creating the online payment industry (Paypal), Electric Vehicle industry (Telsa) and the reusable rocket industry (SpaceX). How many industries have you created?
Here is another chart showing the Poverty Rate. Notice how it dropped from 1959, started up under the Carter Administration, declined towards the end of the Reagan Administration as Inflation that started under the Carter Administration was control. It did soared under President Obama before reaching a historic low under the Trump Administration before the Covid struck.
https://www.statista.com/ch…
Poverty rate in the United States from 1959 to 2018
The actual data provides NO support for your talking points.
lol this is comical
the average hourly worker today does not make 23 dollars an hour, not even if you count airline employees and other folks (like me) as hourly employees. on s over 300K (soon 400K salary I get paid for X number of hours a year after that we drive into overtime. but that does not make me an hourly employee. thanks for playing this is babble
here are some numbers for you . in 1982 the average truck driver made over 100K in today dollars. except today the average driver makes just over 44K and drives about 1/4 more miles then the 1980 guy did. thanks for playing Tom
So, for the record, you believe that the data from the World Economic Forum is incorrect? BTW, it is interesting that you selected truck drivers as their fall in pay is directly due to the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, passed by President Jimmy Carter. Thanks for proving my point. ?
https://www.businessinsider…
How a little-known 1980 law slashed pay for millions of truck drivers and created big-box retail as we know it
Rachel Premack
Jul 25, 2020, 7:46 AM
“The Motor Carrier Act of 1980, passed by President Jimmy Carter, slashed the cost of moving goods by truck. It also eroded one of America’s great blue-collar jobs: truck driving.”
that is not why we are where we are.
It’s why truckers’ pay is where it’s at now. You picked it as an example.
Really, the data speaks for itself, if you set ideology aside when analyzing how we reached where we are.
Trucker and airline and all professional pay is going down because 1) unions have been broken and 2) entire organizations have grown up around the notion that professions and professionals work just like the folks who manage the cash registers are. ie that all they need to do is scan the things and it works
this is why folks who work in airplane factories in South Carolina make about 1/2 what they do in seattle…and the results show
Yes, blame the corporations like Boeing instead of the law makers who create the environment they must make decisions in. Would you prefer that Airbus took Boeing’s market away with subsidies and tariffs that drove them into bankruptcy?
The Reagan administration had no policy of breaking unions. It hardly needed one – unions were busily breaking themselves by driving their host organisms into bankruptcy and liquidation. That had been going on since at least the 60s. The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation was set up more than six years before Reagan took office. That’s the outfit designed to give at least token taxpayer-funded bailouts to retirees whose union pensions evaporated along with their vanished former employers. The PBGC is still around and still doing its thing after nearly a half-century.
There’s still quite a bit of industry in the U.S., but it has mostly shifted to right-to-work states and away from blue states. Pharma is not an exception to decades-long trends – quite a bit of that has gone to China too.
Airlines still have unions. What they don’t have, by and large, is profits. Once airline fares and routes were substantially decontrolled in the late 70s – under Carter, by the way – boardings skyrocketed but margins shrank and unions couldn’t count on routinely getting their way anymore.
fiction. REagan actively busted unions and tolerated companies that did that.
Evidence? You keep stating your opinions as if they were truth without providing any evidence to support them. And ignoring any evidence that show your opinions are in conflict with the facts.
For example, you use Boeing as an example of “Union Busting” and implying it was from the Reagan Era when it only built its plant in South Carolina in 2009, decades after the Reagan Administration.
lol I did not use Boeing as evidence of anything. Reagan started the union busting with the air traffic controllers union, it accelerated from there 🙂 fly safe
So who else owns any major aircraft factories in South Carolina producing aircraft with quality issues?
I guess you never have heard of President Truman and the Railroad Strike of 1946. President Truman signed an Executive Order prohibiting the unions, private unions striking against private businesses, from striking and when they struck anyway he threatened to draft the railroad union members into the U.S. Army forcing the unions to surrender and accept the railroad’s offer.
Again, the history goes a lot further than your selective memory of the only union leader to be elected President and involves both political parties.
Several a/c manufactures in SC
Yet only one has been accused of Union busting while having facilities in both Seattle and South Carolina as you well know. And has had issues of quality control with the product being built.
dont forget in the non union plant :)_
Guess Boeing learned a few lessons from 40 years of working with China to supply it with airliners.
companies as a rule are rethinking the Friedman theory of the earth being flat and it doesnt matter where you build things…shipping cost are exploding and well the earth is really not flat. the first step is just to come home, the second step is to realizing that not every where at home is quality
but the overseas theory was the way to refigure American business that had the I dont know expected result of destroying the middle class now the Republican base doesnt even like it…because they were the ones shafted the hardest
Truman also tangled with the United Steelworkers and threatened to have the Army take over the steel mills. He and the trade unions butted heads a lot.
PATCO wasn’t an industrial union, it was a government employee union – a type of creature that has no legitimate reason to exist anyway. The arrogant SOBs at PATCO thought they could hold up the government at gunpoint because they fancied themselves irreplaceable. They learned otherwise, to their considerable cost. Reagan didn’t have to “bust” any other government employee unions – the point had been made. Any industrial unions that came to grief on his watch did so because they were stupid parasites that killed their hosts.
lol you folks always like “exceptions” sigh
PATCO was an exception. So point me to another example of a union Reagan supposedly “busted.”
What color is the sky on your planet? You should realize when you write ahistorical nonsense like that that you sound just like Ralphie in A Chistmas Story talking about his buddy claiming to have seen some bears out behind a local store.
LOL one of my favorite flicks. Ronaldus the great did many good things. his economic answers were flawed…and yeah the right wing does not like unions. good morning
No, the right wing does not like unions. Why should it? Unions always support Democrats.
But Reagan was the only U.S. President who had formerly been head of a union, the Screen Actors Guild.
As I see them, unions are essentially extortion and protection rackets with government licenses. I think Reagan had a more tolerant attitude toward unions than I do. That said, he wasn’t going to let PATCO extort the country and didn’t.
It’s certainly true that private sector trade unions didn’t thrive on Reagan’s watch. But, then, they had been fading under his predecessors too and would continue to do so under his successors for fundamental reasons having nothing to do with who was in the White House.
The only such economy that has been “taking market share” – at least until recently – has been China. Going forward, I don’t think that will prove sustainable. Europe, for its part, certainly hasn’t been doing so.
Where European human spacefaring is concerned, I’m from Missouri. The Euros have made such noises on several previous occasions. Each time, there was a bit of manic arm-waving and expostulation followed by retirement to their daybeds and commencement of long naps. I fail to see any reason to believe this time will be any different.
Building a methalox Falcon 9-ish vehicle is already supposedly on the European space agenda. Initial capability is scheduled for very late this decade or early next – far too little, far too late. Copying Starship is completely beyond current European capability. By the time it is not – if ever – Lord only knows what SpaceX will be doing.