In a concise note, the Montaigne Institut notifies the risk of spatial deletion of France and demands a strategic start.
A note The alarm signal draws the French space strategy from the Montaigne Institute with the title “Space force: The awakening of France”. For fifteen years, France and Europe have been exploding their position in space by the technocratic management of the sector without a clear strategic vision that the text that requires a clarification.
France, he says, still has extraordinary skills, but without structuring decisions, it can gain permanently in favor of the United States, China or emerging powers such as India. The note points to several weaknesses.
In terms of connectivity, France, for example, still depends on Starlink – we saw it in Mayotte, which was destroyed by a hurricane. The advanced alarm capacities are based on foreign technologies. She overlooked the turn of the constellations, does not structure his strategy about the restoration of providers and lacks in credible projects inhabited flight or moon research. Even worse, according to the institute, the lack of budget coherence, administrative severity and obsession with technical perfection slow down the emergence of new actors.
However, this analysis is not limited to a criticism and the Montaign institute offers a complete revision of French spatial policy, starting with real autonomy to critical segments. This implies the strengthening of the optical observation programs, the guarantee of national missile warning, the support of OneWeb against Starlink and to accelerate the development of the Galileo PRS signal to reduce GPS dependency. It would also be a question of designing a multi -capital, integrated, modular European constellation that can meet the requirements for intelligence, navigation, connectivity and space monitoring.
The vision defended by the institute goes beyond the military segment and includes the revival of an ambition for human explorations, with the development of a European inhabited capsule, which results from a space freight project and the creation of a hypersian hyperlicat aircraft from the room. This revival would require an agile contract department inspired by the NASA model, in which the state functions as an an anchor science and guarantees activity volumes without losing technical innovations. It would also require a cultural change, accept failure as a step of the innovation process and promote the emergence of private actors who are able to make it quickly, well and at controlled costs.
The government is working on a spatial strategy
The government is not deaf about these concerns. On March 6, Prime Minister François Bayrou SGDSN entrusted the mission to coordinate the development of a national space strategy in connection with the ministries concerned, the CNES and the large public and private actors in the industry. This text expected in the summer of 2025 must fulfill the identified main problems: access to space, security of the orbital infrastructure, decision -making, industrial innovation, European cooperation.
At this stage, however, the Matignon initiative remains a promise, since no budgetary, technological and industrial arbitration processes were returned.
France in 2030, which was introduced in 2021, had still expected part of the needs. The space component with 1.5 billion euros aimed at structuring an agile sector with regard to mini-winter, service constellations and support for start-ups. It made it possible to draw the contours of a French new space. But its effects are still limited and distributed. A real strategic conductor is missing harms the overall coherence.