Europe’s Space Security Build-Up and the Governance Gap Behind It

Europe’s expanding space security capabilities are outpacing the governance frameworks designed to oversee them.

On 10 September 2026, at the International Space Summit in Paris, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen confirmed a proposal to allocate €131 billion to defence, security and space under the EU’s 2028-2034 budget, five times the current amount (EUNews.it, 2026a). Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius, presenting the same figures, added that the national systems are present, but they are slow and fragmented (EUNews.it, 2026a). The announcement followed the Commission’s 7 August 2026 agreement with the SpaceRISE consortium to add 66 satellites to IRIS² for defence use, expanding secure governmental communications capacity by 60 per cent within the EU (EUNews.it, 2026b). Nevertheless, Kubilius named fragmentation, not funding, as the main problem.

The €131 billion figure and the IRIS² expansion sit inside a wider effort, the European Space Shield, an action plan the Commission disclosed in February 2026 (European Parliament, 2026). It rests on four components: interoperable national defence capabilities built on the Galileo Public Regulated Service; space domain awareness; jamming and spoofing mitigation; and in-orbit servicing infrastructure (European Parliament, 2026). Space domain awareness, the monitoring function, is now doing the most work of the four, and is the concern of this article.

Two Gaps Behind the Numbers

The reliance on automated monitoring reflects a problem of scale. Objects tracked in Earth orbit rose from 31,773 at the end of 2023 to 39,246 at the end of 2024, driven by new mega-constellations and by improved tracking sensitivity (The Earth & I, 2025). By late 2025 the figure had reached approximately 45,300, tracked jointly by the US Space Surveillance Network and ESA (AZoQuantum, 2025); by 31 July 2026, ESA’s own live catalogue recorded 46,770 (European Space Agency, 2026).

Human review of that volume is no longer practical at the pace threats develop, which is why automated detection has become the default. The funding behind it, though, has grown faster than any framework meant to govern it. The EU’s 2021-2027 Space Programme, at €14.8 billion, represented 1.38 per cent of that period’s €1,074.3 billion long-term budget (Council of the European Union, 2020, 2021); the €131 billion proposed for 2028-2034 would be 6.55 per cent of the nearly €2 trillion framework proposed in 2025 (European Commission, 2025b). Space has moved from a minor budget line to a central one, without a matching shift in how decisions about it get made.

What Has Been Tried

Two EU instruments already address parts of this problem, though neither closes it. The EU Space Act, proposed by the Commission on 25 June 2025, would replace thirteen separate national regulatory regimes with a single framework covering object tracking, debris mitigation, cybersecurity and environmental sustainability, with obligations scaled to company size (European Commission, 2025a). It is the first binding EU-wide instrument of its kind and answers Kubilius’s complaint about fragmentation more directly than anything else proposed so far. Its scope, however, is built around commercial and civil operators. It contains no provision on military threat-response decision-making, nor any standard for the automated detection systems space domain awareness depends on.

The Space Shield action plan covers more of that ground, since it is explicitly a defence instrument and the piece that actually funds the monitoring function. It remains, though, a non-legislative plan, so the interoperability it promises among national systems depends on voluntary cooperation, the same basis Kubilius called slow and fragmented (European Parliament, 2026).

The underlying conceptual problem predates both instruments. Fiott (2023), writing three years before the current funding surge, argued that “space domain awareness” was not a settled term inside EU policy, since fusing military and non-military threat data across domains raises the question of who owns the resulting picture and who acts on it, a question the 2023 Space Strategy for Security and Defence introduced without answering. That ambiguity has since been funded.

Policy Proposals

Three measures would narrow this gap, though none is without cost. A joint EU-ESA protocol for classifying space incidents, distinguishing accidental interference from hostile action and naming a clear decision authority, would directly address the ambiguity Fiott identified; agreeing which body holds that authority across 27 member states is itself a negotiation likely to move as slowly as the fragmentation it aims to fix. A human-in-the-loop requirement for AI-based detection systems, modelled on the AI Act’s risk tiers despite military systems falling outside its scope, would close the accountability gap without reopening that exemption; lacking a legal basis, it would remain voluntary guidance layered onto an already voluntary plan. Tying Space Shield funding to demonstrated interoperability, on the model of SAFE loan conditionality, would give Kubilius’s complaint financial consequences; it also risks penalising member states that are willing but administratively slower, reproducing the uneven-capacity problem such conditionality is meant to solve.

Governance Outlook

Kubilius named the problem accurately: national systems that are slow and fragmented. The instruments built so far, and those proposed above, address parts of that description without resolving it. Whether doctrine catches up with the capability now being funded will matter less at the next summit than the first time an automated system has to decide, on its own, what it is looking at.

Bibliography

AZoQuantum (2025) ‘Where Are We on Space Debris in 2025?’, AZoQuantum, 31 October.

Council of the European Union (2020) Multiannual financial framework for 2021-2027 adopted, Press release, 17 December.

Council of the European Union (2021) Council adopts position on €14.8 billion EU space programme for 2021-2027, Press release, 19 April.

EUNews.it (2026a) ‘Budget: EU Commission urges Member States not to cut the 131 billion euros for defence and space’, EUNews.it, 10 September.

EUNews.it (2026b) ‘Space, IRIS²: EU signs deal to add 66 satellites for defence’, EUNews.it, 7 August.

European Commission (2025a) Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Union space programme (EU Space Act), COM(2025) 335 final, 25 June.

European Commission (2025b) EU budget 2028-2034: long-term budget proposal, 16 July.

European Parliament (2026) European Space Shield – action plan, Legislative Train Schedule.

European Space Agency (2026) Space Environment Statistics, DISCOS Space Debris User Portal.

Fiott, D. (2023) In Orbit: The European Union, Defence and Space Domain Awareness, Egmont Institute/Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy, 7 July.

The Earth & I (2025) ‘2025 Space Environment Report’, The Earth & I.