European Strategic Autonomy: Looking Up to the Heavens

By Benjamin Robitaille, Research Fellow at the European Liberal Forum

During the post–Cold War period, space was mainly seen as a domain of discovery and innovation. Scientific ingenuity and ambition thrived within this global commons, leading to vital civilian services such as GPS, earth observation, and satellite systems that connected the world and deepened awareness of our planet’s environmental pressures. It was also an era of relative restraint, shaped by a culture of collaboration and a commitment to the peaceful use of space born out of the trauma of the 1960s space crisis. Organisations like the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs helped institutionalise these norms, while the Outer Space Treaty famously stated that space exploration ‘shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries’. For liberals, this cooperative order embodied a core conviction: that progress is greatest when the knowledge and infrastructure of space are treated as public goods, open and accessible to all.

A new space race?

The era of cooperation is fading and with it the viability of that conviction. With the war in Ukraine solidifying the ‘key role of space-based connectivity for the conduct of military operations’, the strategic space race that once epitomised US–Soviet rivalry has returned in a multipolar form. This time, with conventional strategic theory now identifying space as a 5^th domain of warfare, Europe cannot afford to be merely a spectator.

As space assets grow increasingly important to national security, their operational environment is becoming a battleground for new forms of hybrid threats and power projection. This is reflected in recent global spending trends, where space defence is the fastest growing contributor in the rise of government space budgets.

Consider the wake-up call Europe received in early 2022. On the very day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a cyberattack on the Viasat KA-SAT network severed connectivity for Ukrainian forces and spilled over into Europe, even disabling thousands of German wind turbines. It was a stark reminder that modern European life is built on a web of invisible threads running through orbit, and that an expanding arsenal of hybrid tools is threatening to cut them. The spectre of kinetic anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons looms large, with China’s infamous 2007 test and Russia’s  2021 ASAT launch demonstrating their destructive potential. Simultaneously, non-kinetic attacks such as jamming, spoofing, and cyber intrusions threaten to cripple Europe’s space-enabled infrastructure.

If Europe aspires to be a geopolitical actor in the face of these risks, it must move beyond protecting dual-use space infrastructure and adopt a more cohesive strategic approach, with deterrence as a central pillar. For liberals, this should not be understood as unfettered militarisation of orbit, but a way to safeguard it. By making sabotage unprofitable, it protects the infrastructures that keep societies open, and allies connected. The US, Russia, China and a few individual European countries already integrate the space domain into their military doctrine and strategy.

The EU, by contrast, still regards space primarily as a civilian realm, with defence capabilities delegated to national silos, with wide disparities between individual nations. This gap weakens Europe’s credibility. ‘Space is a strategic area where big powers are now competing… Europe must defend its interests and freedom to operate in space’, stressed EU Commissioner Thierry Breton in 2022. In short, Europe’s security and autonomy now extend all the way to Earth’s orbit. Its strategic thinking must extend there too

The EU has begun to react. While in 2016, its Strategic Compass framed space strategy in civil and economic terms, the watershed moment came with the EU Space Strategy for Security and Defence unveiled in March 2023, the first document to explicitly treat space as a strategic domain of EU security. The message was clear: Europe cannot hinge its future competitiveness and space autonomy solely on Galileo’s navigation or Copernicus’ earth observation.

But beneath the rhetoric lies an imbalance. The strategy is built on four pillars: threat assessment, resilience and protection, strategic partnerships, and research and development (R&D). While progress has been made across all of them, resilience has received the largest share of attention through the proposed EU Space Act, discussed in this previous blog post. The next phase must, therefore, focus on the other three areas.

If Europe is to take space seriously as a strategic domain, the first step is to sharpen its vision, both in orbit and on earth. It currently lacks the capacity to properly detect hybrid threats in outer space, a gap that requires investment in infrastructure (such as the proposed European Military Space Surveillance Awareness Network), as well as people and doctrine. When it comes to CSDP missions, the already “overstretched” EU Satellite Centre (SatCen) should be given a broader mandate and the resources to deliver genuine Imagery Intelligence (IMINT).

Innovation or irrelevance

But detection alone is not enough. Europe also lags behind the United States and China when it comes to kinetic space-to-space technologies such as manoeuvrable satellites, reusable military space vehicles, on-orbit refuelling, and hunter-killer or nesting-doll satellites. While the European Defence Fund (EDF) spurs the EU’s forward-looking space defence R&D with projects like ODIN’S EYE and TWISTER, these are reserved for improving missile warning and space/ground situational awareness.

A key priority for Europe’s space-defence industrial base should be public-private partnerships, and since much of its innovation hinges on SMEs, programmes like CASSINI are crucial for closing the gap. By investing €1 billion into space start-ups and SMEs to open markets and enable innovation, CASSINI shows how liberal tools can help drive the dual-use technologies Europe needs.

Bridging Europe’s space governance gap

The final challenge is institutional. Coordination between the EU and ESA remains sluggish, constrained by ESA’s exclusion of military functions and member states reluctancy to pool security competences under an EU framework. This division is becoming untenable, and policymakers are beginning to acknowledge this. Renew MEP Christophe Grudler has called for a dedicated EU Space Programme budget line for security to ensure sustained funding and attentions. For liberals this governance coherence is just as much about efficiency as it is about avoiding fragmentation that weakens Europe’s autonomy.

Freedom requires hard space power

Space assets such as satellites are crucial for maintaining the connective tissue of democracies and defence readiness. Ukraine’s war has shown that without secure space assets, armies cannot fight, and societies cannot function. For Europe, protecting and enhancing the dual-use nature of satellites is necessary to become a credible defender of its citizens and a reliable ally to those under attack.

Deterrence in space is therefore a liberal imperative: it safeguards openness by making aggression unprofitable. To remain a serious geopolitical actor, Europe must pair its values with power, investing in resilience, space defence innovation, and intelligence. The sky is no longer the limit for Europe’s strategic autonomy.