French President Emmanuel Macron wants Europe to develop its own way of sending astronauts into space within a decade. Europe already builds rockets and satellites and sends astronauts to the International Space Station – but it still relies on American spacecraft to get them there. As the global space sector expands, the question is whether Europe should invest in closing that gap, and what it would take to do so.
Europe is already a major space power. It builds satellites and launches them on European rockets, and operates Copernicus, one of the world’s leading Earth observation programmes, which uses satellites to monitor the planet’s climate and environment.
