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The European Commission should help to plan space projects, and to focus
them on Europe’s needs instead of on competing national projects. This call
from an expert panel working for the Commission comes a month before members
of the European Space Agency must decide on changes to its programme, in
the face of tightening budgets.

Roy Gibson, chairman of the panel and a former head of the ESA, said
in Brussels last week that thanks to the work of the ESA and other agencies,
space had ceased to be a place mainly for technological experimentation
and had become a place for everyday ‘operational’ activities. The ESA is
an R&D agency, however, and cannot run operational programmes.

As a result ‘space is too important to be left to space agencies’, says
Gibson. He says European users of space services should meet to decide what
they need and base future space development on that. ‘We must get away from
one-off expressions of national prestige,’ says Gibson.

The Commission has an important part to play in organising Europe’s
future in space, both because it is designed to coordinate industrial and
governmental activities, and because it is a big user of space technology.
The Commission is Europe’s largest customer for images taken by satellite.

The panel’s advice is the starting point for a Community space policy
which will be put to European ministers responsible for space early next
year. The policy will outline how the Commission might help to organise
Europe’s space industry.

Meanwhile, the report’s recommendation that activities in space should
be driven by customer demand rather than by a desire to develop new types
of technology is likely to influence ministers at the ESA summit in Munich
next month. The future of some of the ESA’s largest projects will be decided
then (This Week, 19 October).

Gibson’s panel, which included Jean Brachet, the head of the French
remote sensing company Spot Image, and John Holt, space systems director
for British Aerospace, says that Europe needs a ‘flexible strategic framework’
to allow choices to be made among competing projects. The panel says that
Europe has not done the basic research needed for it to make the right choice.
It calls for more government and Community funding for space research.

According to the report, the activity most important to Europe is remote
sensing of the environment, followed by telecommunications and weather satellites.
The high-profile projects, such as the Hermes spaceplane, should not divert
money from the less glamorous applications, such as Earth observation satellites,
says the report.

The recommendation most likely to cause disagreement among commissioners
and ministers is a call for an end to the separation of Europe’s civil and
military space programmes. The panel points out that France spends more
on defence-related space projects, chiefly surveillance satellites, than
it contributes to the cash-strapped ESA. The Community is barred from military
R&D, but while the ESA is required to be ‘peaceful’, it could perform
military roles such as observation or verification if its member states
wished.