EUR: Exclusive: Europe’s plan for military space surveillance

Presented by FTI Consulting

BLUF: The Arsenal sat with the head of the European Space Agency (ESA) to discuss ESA’s new defense program: European Resilience from Space (ERS). 

Josef Aschbacher said ERS will serve as a precursor for the EU’s future Earth Observation Governmental Service (EOGS), with 30cm/pixel resolution images updated every 30 minutes.

European forces will need new hardware to make full use of the Galileo Public Regulated Service (PRS), the EU’s secure satnav system, which is due to become operational this year. Defense equipment manufacturers that want to supply PRS-equipped gear will also need official permission to procure the necessary receivers.

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The EU is at least two years away from spending any real money on a military-grade surveillance satellite system, the Earth Observation Governmental Service (EOGS). 

At the European Space Conference in Brussels last week, The Arsenal sat down with Josef Aschbacher, the head of the European Space Agency (ESA), to talk about how his organization is already getting to work on it.

The European Commission wants to fund EOGS from its proposed European Competitiveness Fund, which would allocate €131 billion for defense, security and space over 2028-2035.

The budget is nowhere near settled. It needs to be agreed as part of broader talks among national leaders on the EU’s next overall budget for 2028-2035. Those negotiations usually go down to the wire. Sometimes they don’t leave enough time for necessary legislation to pass, so funding programs can’t start on time..

“We will start working now,” Aschbacher told The Arsenal. “In a few weeks, we will open the call for tender for industry to apply for funding, based on the definition of a framework which we set.”

The ESA’s defense program, European Resilience from Space, is a “system of systems,” Aschbacher said, that will integrate earth observation with secure communications and navigation.

For the earth observation element of ERS to work, “it needs an integrated communications—or ‘transport’— layer, as it is called, in order to ‘plug in’ the earth observation satellites and have secure communication,” said Aschbacher. 

Europe is also building a new low-earth orbit satellite communications array for government and military use, called IRIS², due to go live in 2030. 

“Eventually, the transport layer [for ERS] should be IRIS²,” Aschbacher said. “But in order to start with our capability that we're building up, of course, we already need a transport layer, so we have to make sure that, technically, these two things are aligned and interfacing.”

The navigation element of ERS will contribute to Celeste, a low-earth orbit array intended to bolster the EU’s satellite navigation system, Galileo.

The EU’s existing earth-observation system, Copernicus, was built for “mostly civilian purposes: agriculture, forestry, health, city planning, ship routing and so on,” said Aschbacher, who was ESA’s director of earth observation before getting the top job in 2021.

“The resolution of Copernicus is five meters or 10 meters—at least today. The next generation will be better.” 

A resolution of five meters per pixel is sufficient to monitor large-scale phenomena across a wide area, such as deforestation or coastal erosion. But it can’t identify small details, such as military vehicles.

Aschbacher told The Arsenal that ERS will target 30cm or better, which is enough to pick out tanks, trucks and armored personnel carriers. That requires “a completely different type of sensor” with a smaller coverage area, meaning more satellites will be needed, he said.

ERS will begin by pooling European countries’ existing national capabilities in earth observation. 

“Even if you put together the French, the Italian, the UK, or whatever other systems, you have two dozen satellites altogether of this military-grade resolution,” said Aschbacher. “You get a couple of images a day.”

That’s inadequate for monitoring battlefield developments. For example, “a lot of Russian air defense radars will often move up to every half hour when they're potentially threatened,” Julian Bronk, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, told The Arsenal in December.

The plan for Europe’s new system is to provide updates at least every half hour. “To do that, you would need hundreds or thousands of satellites,” said Aschbacher.

“Thirty minutes: This is the big target between the tasking of the satellites to receiving the data,” Major General Pascal Legai of the French Air and Space Force told The Arsenal in an interview.  

“It’s already a huge challenge, but this is the main target that we have for the ERS program,” said Legai, whom France has seconded to ESA as a security and defense adviser. 

“The US partner is not reliable at all,” he said, referring to the Trump administration’s capricious behavior towards its European allies. “We cannot build our autonomy on this relationship.”

Until recently, ESA has been focused on civilian activities. The new “geopolitical context” has fueled defense ministries’ interest in the agency.

“The defense actors are looking at what ESA can do for them,” Legai told The Arsenal. 

As challenging as it may be to achieve, even 30-minute updates can only tell you so much about enemy movements. 

“It’s very important to combine satellites with drones, because the drone systems have this big advantage of a permanent view of the ground, and it’s possible to have full-motion video,” Legai told The Arsenal.

Legai stressed that European Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities need to be independent. 

While ESA will build European Resilience from Space, it won’t run it, Aschbacher told The Arsenal.

“We will build up the space infrastructure, satellites, ground segment and so on, and then hand it over to an operator,” he said. 

That could be the European Commission or a body it chooses, such as the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA).

The difference between EU and ESA membership* raises the question of who exactly will have access to ERS/EOGS capabilities. 

If it’s anything like Copernicus, then it’ll be for the European Commission to negotiate access with non-EU countries, Nicolaus Hanowski, ESA’s earth observation chief told The Arsenal. For example, Britain, though an ESA member, had to negotiate reentry to the Copernicus program after Brexit. It regained access in 2024.

*ESA has 23 member states; the EU has 27. There are three countries that are in ESA, but not the EU: Norway, Switzerland and Britain. Seven EU countries are not full ESA member states, but are either associate members or—like Canada—have cooperation agreements: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Slovakia.

After a decade-plus pilot phase, the European Commission is expected this year to declare that a dedicated satellite navigation system for military, emergency services and governments is fully operational. 

But getting all of Europe’s armed forces connected to the Galileo Public Regulated Service (PRS) could take a while longer. 

Lieutenant Colonel Alain Muls (ret.), a former Belgian Army officer who taught geodesy (the study of Earth’s surface) and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) as a professor at the country’s Royal Military Academy before retiring at the new year. 

He spoke to The Arsenal about the logistics of connecting European forces to PRS. Despite the long pilot phase, it’s unlikely that European forces are already using the European system, Muls told The Arsenal.

“At the moment they are using the old PY code,” he said, provided by the United States’ Global Positioning System (GPS). 

When GPS was set up, “it was conceived to have a military code, which was called ‘P’ for ‘precise’ code. Later on, it was encrypted into the Y code.”

In other words, receivers decrypt the Y code to obtain the original P code.

Muls said Galileo signals “have a better type of correlation function than the legacy GPS signals.” 

A better—or narrower—correlation function allows more precise measurements of the distance between receiver and satellite, and thus more accurate positioning.

“The moment Europe introduced the signals, the Americans saw naturally what Europe was doing, and they decided to follow along and to also use the new type of signals that Europe had developed,” Muls told The Arsenal.

Galileo PRS has other advantages over GPS besides better positioning, but they’re classified, said Muls. On the other hand, there are things GPS can do that Galileo can’t—like boosting signal strength by up to 20 decibels to overcome jamming.

The US is now rolling out a new service, M code, to replace the PY code and match some of the new capabilities of Europe’s Galileo PRS.

Since most European countries are NATO members, Muls said they will have to use M Code.

“On the other hand, we are also Europe, so we also need to use our system,” he said, highlighting Donald Trump’s insistence that Europeans take more responsibility for their own defense. “That would be something for Europe to do—to use the PRS within military systems and security systems.”

It is possible to use both PRS and M Code, but not with the same level of integration because each service requires a different receiver, Muls told The Arsenal. 

A common receiver for both would be ideal, but that would require an agreement between Europe and the US. The codes needed to decrypt each signal are state secrets.

Once either signal is decrypted by the receiver, it can be read by any interface conforming to US National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) standards.

Muls said there’s already a “well-developed” variety of PRS receivers being manufactured by certified companies, but they still need to be integrated into military systems.

Each country using PRS can decide which body or office to nominate as a Competent PRS Authority — for example, the Belgian CPA is a department within the National Security Authority (NVO/ANS).

To obtain permission from national CPAs to make the receivers, manufacturers must comply with strict security requirements. For example, Belgian firm Septentrio had to build a Faraday cage (a structure that blocks inbound and outbound signals) in its basement to work on it, said Muls.

Contacted by The Arsenal, staff at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, which also supplies PRS receivers, said they couldn’t talk publicly about their work without government approval.

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