The European Space Agency (ESA) will ask its member states in November to allocate "approximately 1 billion euros" for the development of a military-grade intelligence satellite network, the organization's Director General Josef Aschbacher said, UNN reports with reference to Euractiv.
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As part of this funding plan, ESA will work on an EU program aimed at helping militaries and governments counter threats and mitigate the consequences of natural disasters by transmitting ultra-high-resolution optical images to Earth at intervals of less than 30 minutes.
"Strategically, this is very important because the project is aimed at a new group of users, namely users in the security and defense sector," Aschbacher said, speaking on the sidelines of the annual conference of the European Institute of Space Policy in Vienna.
Other space programs of the bloc, such as Galileo, a GPS alternative for geonavigation, and Copernicus, used to monitor the effects of climate change, are mainly used for civilian purposes.
Aschbacher said that the intelligence constellation will be part of ESA's overall budget request of 22 billion euros for the next three years. Details will be discussed at a funding summit in Bremen next month, where countries will be invited to contribute to various programs.
At the same time, the EU is currently considering the distribution of its space expenditures in the seven-year budget for 2028-2034.
Despite the fact that it was once considered a "forbidden" topic for ESA, which was founded in the 1970s to implement projects for peaceful purposes, Aschbacher said that the agency's 22 countries agreed that defense projects should be included to strengthen security.
"This does not require changes to our convention, as we discussed this in detail last year; the wording 'peaceful purposes' is actually interpreted for defense," Aschbacher said. "The best proof that [capitals] agree with this interpretation is that they asked me to submit the program."
The European Commission calls the new military satellite system the "Earth Observation governmental service" (EOGS), and ESA calls it the "European Resilience from Space."