We are in Bremen, Germany, where the 2025 Ministerial Council of the European Space Agency is being held. Two days in which the top management of ESA, together with the ministers for space policies of the member countries – including Italy – are deciding Europe’s future in space for the next 15 years.
ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher proposed the Strategy2040 action plan in the morning, divided into five key objectives:
- Earth observation for environmental and climate monitoring;
- scientific research and space exploration through space missions in the Solar System;
- autonomy for access to space with the development of European launchers;
- European economic and industrial competitiveness and, last but not least
- inspire and involve citizens and the policy sphere.
To achieve this objective, ESA has requested a budget of 22 billion euros from member states, an increase of approximately 2 billion compared to what was requested in the last Council three years ago, also motivated by the increasingly strategic role space and its infrastructures are having especially in the field of national defense in this particular historical period, in which the European Union finds itself squeezed in the east between the war in Ukraine and the growing security threats coming from Russia, and in the west by the threats of withdrawal from support for European defense by the USA.
As reiterated by Aschbacher, today we find ourselves in a “perfect storm” and for this reason, more than in the past, space is playing an increasingly crucial part of a great geopolitical, economic, industrial game on which not only national security but also environmental issues depend, especially in light of the relative failure of COP30 in Brazil to “keep alive” the Paris Agreements. The new ESA strategy, according to Aschbacher, will serve to make Europe a protagonist in this challenge whose main “competitors” include the USA (currently engaged in the return of humans to the Moon with the Artemis programme) and China, which in recent years has been showing enormous and rapid progress in the space sector.
