Brussels: The European Parliament’s industry committee has pushed the EU Space Act vote back to 10 November 2026, according to the revised timetable that rapporteur Elena Donazzan circulated to fellow MEPs this month, delaying a ballot her original calendar had pencilled in for mid-2025. The slippage gives the eight lawmakers steering the file through Parliament more time to align amendments before the committee, known as ITRE, casts its first formal vote on the Commission’s proposal.
The European Commission tabled the EU Space Act on 25 June 2025, and Parliament formally referred the file to the Industry, Research and Energy committee on 8 September 2025 with Donazzan, an Italian member of the European Conservatives and Reformists group, as rapporteur. She published her draft report on 3 March 2026, and lawmakers on the Environment and Internal Market committees delivered their own opinions on 19 March and 21 April respectively, feeding into the text ITRE will now vote on in November.
Committee members tabled competing batches of amendments through mid-April 2026, with shadow rapporteurs including Angelika Niebler of the European People’s Party and Giorgio Gori of the Socialists and Democrats leading rival political groups’ positions. The rapporteurs held an informal meeting in Strasbourg to narrow their differences and have scheduled a further session to keep working through contested provisions before the EU Space Act vote in November.
The proposed regulation would impose common safety, resilience and sustainability obligations on satellite operators and other space companies doing business in the EU for the first time, folding cybersecurity duties into the EU Space Act framework alongside the bloc’s NIS2 cybersecurity directive. The Commission designed the rules to give operators a single market-access regime rather than the patchwork of national licensing systems that currently governs launches and satellite operations across member states.
Industry lobbies and some legal scholars have pushed back on parts of the draft, particularly a national security clause that critics argue hands governments broad discretion over commercial space activity, a concern documented in Parliament’s own research briefing on the file. Satellite operators have separately warned that the compliance timeline could squeeze smaller companies competing against better-resourced American and Chinese rivals.
Parliament will not be ready to open formal trilogue talks with the Council, which gave broad political backing to the proposal’s objectives when ministers debated it at the Competitiveness Council in December 2025, until a negotiating mandate clears a subsequent plenary session. Until then, the EU Space Act vote on 10 November remains the milestone the European space industry is watching most closely.
