Resolution on space market uptake
The European Parliament adopted a resolution tabled by the EPP, S&D, ECR, ALDE, Greens/EFA and EFDD groups on space market uptake.
Space strategy and market uptake: Parliament encouraged the Commission to present a comprehensive, ambitious and forward-looking strategy, ensuring in the short, medium and long term Europe’s leading position in space technologies and services on global markets, ensuring independent access to space for Europe and ensuring a level playing field for the European space industry.
One of the main elements of the strategy should be market uptake of space data, services and applications to maximise the socio-economic benefits of EU space programmes.
Members called on the Commission to present a proposal for a clear European space industrial policy as part of the upcoming strategy. They also acknowledged the broad range of stakeholders involved in implementing EU space policy, particularly the Commission, the European GNSS Agency (GSA), the European Space Agency (ESA), Copernicus service providers and encouraged them to further foster their cooperation.
Technical barriers: Parliament considered that Galileo and Copernicus should be considered as complementary programmes and that further synergies should be encouraged. Considering that Copernicus data dissemination is too fragmented, Parliament emphasised the need for faster access to large sets of earth observation (EO) data, such as time series. It urged the Commission ensure that Copernicus data are made available to independent ICT platforms, which would allow the storage, management, processing of and easy access to big data, and would make it easier to integrate data sets from as many sources as possible and bring them to the user.
Members also recommended that the Commission work closely with the Member States and the ESA on the creation of a properly integrated infrastructure system, with appropriate levels of data security.
The resolution highlighted the fact that, without Galileo-enabled chipsets and receivers, Galileo market uptake will be severely hampered. In this regard, Parliament called on the GSA to continue to work with chipset and receiver manufacturers in order to understand their needs and to provide them with the necessary technical information and specifications to ensure that as much user equipment as possible is compatible with Galileo.
Market barriers: public sector activities, including those of entrusted European agencies, should be predictable in order to stimulate private sector investments. Therefore, future space services should be mainly provided by, and procured from, commercial enterprises unless there is a good reason not to do so, for example, because of tangible security risks. Members suggested that the mid-term evaluation of the Copernicus and Galileo regulations should be used to ensure a greater involvement of the private sector in the procurement of services.
The Commission is urged to:
- in relation to Copernicus data, to clearly define as soon as possible the role of the core public services and what should be left to the downstream sector;
- assess needs for very high resolution EO data for EU internal operational purposes;
- take measures to facilitate the procurement of space-based services by public authorities, including by encouraging pre-commercial procurement, in particular to support innovative SMEs.
Parliament also called for efforts to be stepped up to raise awareness of the potential of European space programmes amongst the public and private sector and end users and to encourage the use of space data in the public sector and in the business community. More efforts are needed to promote and market the Copernicus programme.
Space in EU policies: according to Members, the Commission should strengthen the links between EU space assets and activities in policy areas such as the internal market, industrial base, jobs, growth, investment, energy, climate, environment, health, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, transport, tourism, the digital single market, regional policy and local planning.
Moreover, there is a huge potential in tackling challenges such as migration, border management and sustainable development.
In this regard, the Commission should carry out a ‘space check’ on all existing and new policy initiatives, to make sure that the best use is made of EU space assets.
Access to finance and expertise: Parliament stressed the need to strengthen funding for development of downstream applications and services and the downstream market in general. It invited the Commission, at the time of the next MFF, to examine the desirability of setting aside for this purpose a greater proportion of the EU space budget. It considered in particular that the innovation potential of Horizon 2020 should be better exploited for the space sector.
Members also stressed that the Commission should support initiatives such as space industry clusters, incubators and similar initiatives to develop a coherent EU strategy to support space entrepreneurship. The Commission is also called upon to help to correct the geographical imbalance of such activities in which the Central and Eastern European countries are lagging behind.
Lastly, the EU and the Member States should, in cooperation with the private sector, step up their efforts to stimulate skills and entrepreneurship and to attract students towards the space sector.