Bremen: European satellite builders opened September still guessing at the shape of the Space Act, the regulation the Commission tabled in June 2025 to govern launch authorisation, debris and space traffic across the single market. Negotiators now expect trilogues to start only late in 2026, more than eighteen months after the proposal landed.
The delay has a paper trail. The Council Presidency put its first compromise text on the table in December 2025 and revised it in March 2026, and the Parliament rapporteur circulated draft amendments in the spring. Each round narrowed some gaps and widened others, and the institutions still disagree on the three questions that matter most to industry.
The first is market access. The Commission wrote the Space Act to cover any operator selling satellite services into the Union, not just companies incorporated in a member state. Non-EU constellation operators and downstream data distributors would need authorisation, and the Council text sharpens the conditions attached to it. American and Asian operators have spent the year lobbying on exactly that clause.
The second is cybersecurity. The Commission built bespoke security duties into the Space Act, and lawyers quickly asked how those duties sit alongside the NIS2 directive that already binds critical infrastructure operators. Parliament wants the two instruments aligned rather than stacked. The Council prefers space-specific rules that do not depend on national NIS2 transposition, which remains uneven.
The third is proportionality. The draft creates a simplified authorisation route for smaller Union operators and exempts some categories outright, and it lets the Commission suspend or withdraw an authorisation for Union-owned assets on the advice of the EU Agency for the Space Programme. Small manufacturers welcome the light regime. Larger firms argue the exemptions redraw competitive lines inside Europe rather than against rivals outside it.
Timing is the practical problem. If trilogues begin in late 2026 and run their usual course, adoption slips toward 2028 and application toward 2030. Satellites ordered today will fly under rules nobody has finished writing, and insurers price that uncertainty into every launch contract. The Commission maintains the file on its EU Space Act page, while the Parliament tracks each procedural step on its legislative train.
Member states have not helped themselves here. Several capitals already run national space licensing regimes, and harmonising them was the original point of the exercise. Governments that legislated first now defend their own texts in Council working parties, which slows convergence and hands the Parliament room to push its own priorities.
There is a counterargument worth stating. Space law written badly lasts decades, and orbital debris rules in particular bind operators long after ministers leave office. Reconciling the Space Act with NIS2, with national licences and with international obligations may cost Europe less now than reopening the regulation in 2032. Industry disputes the arithmetic, not the principle.
What happens next is procedural but consequential. The Council needs a full general approach before trilogues can start in earnest, and the Parliament needs a committee vote behind its rapporteur. Both are expected this autumn. Until then, Europe’s fastest-growing industrial sector plans around a Space Act it can read but cannot rely on.
