Astronauts, heads of state, as well as major economic players in the space industry are set to unite on Wednesday and Thursday at the international space summit, co-hosted by France and Germany, at Paris’ Grand Palais.
Several US companies reportedly withdrew from the event, due to pressure from Washington over support for “EU policy positions.”
The summit comes at a strategic crossroads for the European space industry, described by President Emmanuel Macron as an opportunity to “bring Europeans together around a common ambition” and develop a “shared vision of Europe’s place on the map of global space powers by 2035” when he announced the event in October 2025.
According to the Elysée, the summit will focus on international space cooperation and strengthening space security. In recent years, Europe has increasingly sought to challenge US dominance of the global space market: developing its own homegrown rockets and increasing funding for space at both a state and bloc-wide level.
Europe has historically invested 0.07% of GDP into space programmes, compared with 0.24% by the US.
But 2025 marked a turning point, as the European Space Agency (ESA) approved a record-breaking €22.3 billion budget for its three-year funding cycle (2026–2028) in November, with €35 billion for space for security and defence.
Lunar mining has also emerged as a potential avenue for securing clean-energy resources and critical raw materials, as Europe works to move away from Chinese and Russian dependencies.
Divergence between France and Germany
Nearly a year after Macron announced the summit, it encountered some bumps in the road before the event had even begun. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz confirmed on Friday that he would not attend the summit due to domestic commitments, with defence minister Boris Pistorius and space minister Dorothee Bär set to go in his place.
Behind the scenes, France and Germany have faced a number of disagreements over space and defence projects, ditching the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project in June 2026, after years of disagreements.
Macron has consistently stressed the importance of building up Europe’s strategic autonomy, backing programs like Ariane 6, rather than relying on US providers such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Meanwhile, Germany has expressed a greater willingness to rely on lower-cost US alternatives, such as SpaceX. On Saturday, German startup Isar Aerospace launched the first commercial rocket to reach orbit from mainland Europe, marking a major turning point in Europe’s quest to secure independent access to space. Merz described the launch as “the beginning of a new era.”
US companies withdraw from event
A number of US companies also withdrew from the event, after a White House official reportedly warned them that their attendance “could look like tacit support for EU policy positions,” Politico reported.
A spokesperson for France’s Ministry of Higher Education and Research, which oversees national space policy, told the AFP news agency that SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space, and Starcloud had withdrawn from the event, stating “it’s hard not to link it to the rumours of pressure in the press.”
Speaking to Euronews, Hermann Ludwig Moeller, Director of the European Space Policy Institute described France as a “driving force” in Europe’s space sector, providing “strong political support” to the industry, stressing that the “relevance of space is only increasing.”
“It increasingly becoming a war fighting domain, while at the same time it has become evident also to the general public that conflict has become hybrid in nature, for instance through attacks on critical infrastructures in transport, energy, digital. This is where space can provide increased resilience.”
Moeller stressed the role that space technologies such as satellite navigation have in terms of both civilian and military usage.
“While they are essential to everyday life, the war in Ukraine has also highlighted their strategic importance in modern warfare”, he said.
Kyiv’s reliance on Musk’s Starlink following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has underlined the strategic importance of space services during wartime — that the satellite network provides resilient internet connectivity even when infrastructure is damaged or destroyed.
This reality also pushed Europe to develop its own independent satellite networks, notably the secure internet constellation known as IRIS².