WASHINGTON — The European Commission is preparing to release by March a draft of the first comprehensive European space law, although no one outside of the Commission is quite sure what it will include.
In sessions of the European Space Conference Jan. 23, European Commission officials said they were preparing a release of a European Union space law proposal that they said would broadly address issues of safety and sustainability, while not discussing specific aspects of the bill.
“We need to build a true EU single market for space and this is, of course, the purpose of the upcoming EU space law,” said Thierry Breton, commissioner for the internal market, in a keynote address at the conference.
The law, he said, would help harmonize the current “very diverse space regime” within the EU, where 11 member states have their own national laws for space. “This fragmented approach prevents us from acting as a bloc,” he said. “Therefore, the EU space law will set common rules related to space activities.”
The focus of the proposed law will be on three areas that Breton described as safety, resilience and sustainability. However, neither he nor other European Commission officials at the conference elaborated on specific provisions likely to be in the bill.
In a panel discussion at the conference, Ekaterini Kavvada, director for secure and connected space in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space, said the commission expected to release legislative proposal for the space law in March. She emphasized the same themes for the legislation as Breton but did not go into specifics.
“Everybody talks about it, everybody has very high expectations, but nobody has ever seen it,” quipped Thomas Dermine, state secretary for science policy in the Belgian government, of the proposed space law on that panel. Belgium holds the EU presidency for the first half of 2024 and has made a space law a…
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