France follows Russia, China and the US in creating a spacecommand
PARIS - Thousands of soldiers paraded down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, on foot, on horseback, in tanks and even on a flying hoverboard. But the real action, increasingly, was somewhere far away: outer space.
"Space is increasingly seen as a strategic asset, not only by the major space powers, but also by secondary powers like France," said Mr Jean-Jacques Tortora, director of the European Space Policy Institute in Vienna."Space might potentially be the theatre of military operations, and this justifies the setting up of dedicated space commands to manage these sorts of operations."
Just as Mr Macron was set to announce the creation of the space command, Galileo, Europe's satellite navigation system and its biggest joint project in space, was experiencing a systemwide"outage." All of its 22 orbiting satellites had gone offline."The signals are not to be used," Galileo's operators said.
Emphasizing the need for European autonomy, the commission announced a budget of 16 billion euros from 2021 to 2027, a 44 per cent increase over the previous six-year period. For France - a nation with long-standing military and civilian ambitions in space and with the biggest budget devoted to space activities in Europe - joining the club was a natural step, said Mr Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of the Centre National d'Études Spatiales, the French space agency.
Under the government's plan, the space command will be staffed initially with 200 military personnel and headquartered in Toulouse, site of the French space agency and Airbus' headquarters.
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