According to Bloomberg, the EC intends to spend €2.4 billion from its budget for these purposes
BRUSSELS, February 16. /tass/. The European Union plans to spend €6 billion ($6.8 billion) to create a constellation of communications satellites in low Earth orbit to ensure secure communications for member countries. This is reported by Bloomberg with reference to the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton.
The European Commission intends to spend €2.4 billion from its budget for these purposes. The remaining funds should come from various EU countries and industrial groups. According to Breton, Europe needs to have its own "constellation" of satellites. Such community space plans will help to increase the cybersecurity of EU countries, while providing better broadband access in Europe and Africa.
"This is of paramount importance in terms of our strategic and technical sovereignty," Breton said.
Bloomberg calls the program implemented by the British company OneWeb the closest analogue of this project. OneWeb low-orbit spacecraft are designed to provide ground-based consumers with high-speed Internet directly via satellite communications. Now the group has 428 devices. All of them were withdrawn by Russian Soyuz launch vehicles.
The largest player in this field is the American company SpaceX of entrepreneur Elon Musk with the Starlink microsatellite group. The company launches satellites using a Falcon 9 launch vehicle of its own design from the company-leased sites of the bases of the US Space Forces Vandenberg (California) and Cape Canaveral (Florida), as well as from the Space Center. John F. Kennedy NASA, which is located on Merritt Island in the immediate vicinity of Cape Canaveral. They are put into near-Earth orbit mainly in large batches (up to 60 vehicles). A total of 1,942 Starlink satellites (including test ones) were launched as part of the project by January 7, 2022.
