Space systems with high reliability, long design cycles and high cost are giving way to more flexible and lightweight models, with reduced time-to-market, high replacement rate and production costs that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
New space or Space Industry 4.0 refers to the recent commercialisation of the space market. Traditionally, the State had a monopoly on the sector, with institutional programmes featuring only downstream commercial components, but nowadays, private actors are playing an increasingly important role with private investment initiatives and a clear commercial profitability vocation.
The industry is changing thanks to new launchers, where companies are developing novel systems that significantly reduce launch costs. On the applications side, we have the growing Earth observation business, which thanks to low-cost satellites providing high-quality images can offer services such as monitoring weather incidents, monitoring crops or herds in hard-to-reach places, as well as analysing air pollution or the capacity of reservoirs.
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Most space technology, infrastructure, and services can serve both civilian and military objectives, contributing to an innovative and competitive defence model. Deep tech can tackle emerging challenges that are related to security and privacy, data throughput and energy consumption and are therefore considered to be key technologies which are advancing and innovating the space and satellite industry.
Moreover, the satellite communications sector will benefit from the deployment of constellations in medium and low orbits, which will improve connectivity, hand in hand with 5G and IoT. In the future, these nanosatellites could replace the services offered to date by large geostationary satellites, reducing the cost of bandwidth. In addition, cybersecurity in New Space can be achieved through quantum cryptographic techniques securing optical communication.
Security forms an integral part of European Space Policy. Space-based assets and systems are critical to ensuring security on Earth (security from space) and at the same time, these assets need to be protected in the difficult environment of outer space (security of space).
