Toulouse: The draft EU Space Law that the Commission tabled in early May is in its first reading at Council working party level, and the bracket count on the central article that creates a common regime for space traffic management is starting to climb. Industry submissions to the public consultation that closed on 15 May ran heavily on one question, whether the proposed regulation pre-empts the national licensing regimes that France, Germany, Italy, and Luxembourg have built over the past decade, or whether it sits alongside them as a thin coordination layer.
The Commission’s text takes the harmonisation route. Articles 12 to 18 of the draft require Member States to align their national authorisation procedures around a common dossier, set out a single set of safety, sustainability, and cybersecurity assessment criteria, and create a registration obligation feeding into a European registry of space objects that the EU Agency for the Space Programme would maintain. National authorities keep the licensing decision but operate on the harmonised criteria. The text also introduces minimum financial security requirements for operators conducting launch, in-orbit, and re-entry operations, the first time European law would set a floor for that figure rather than leave it to national regimes.
Toulouse is the place where the friction shows up most cleanly. The French Centre national d’études spatiales licenses operators under the 2008 Space Operations Act, which has been refined three times and is regarded as the most operationally mature of the national regimes in the bloc. CNES officials have argued in public consultations that the EU regulation should explicitly recognise existing national licences as equivalent compliance, rather than require operators to refile. The Italian Space Agency in Rome and the German Federal Network Agency in Bonn are taking similar positions on their own regimes. Luxembourg has gone the other direction, pushing for a more centralised approach that would consolidate licensing in a single EU-level pathway and address concerns about regulatory shopping across the bloc.
Outside the licensing question, the file’s heaviest political weight sits in the space traffic management chapter. The Commission’s draft requires operators of satellites in low Earth orbit to share trajectory data with a European coordination hub on a mandatory schedule and to coordinate collision avoidance manoeuvres through that hub. Critics from the defence and intelligence community across several capitals have flagged the dual-use sensitivity of this data and asked for carve-outs that preserve national operational autonomy for military and intelligence assets. The draft includes an exemption clause for national security missions, but the scope of that clause is one of the brackets that has appeared most recently.
The sustainability chapter, which includes targets for post-mission disposal of satellites and provisions on debris removal services, is where the smaller Member States with growing space sectors see the clearest upside. Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands have all argued that a common standard on disposal would lift the floor for new entrants and reduce the cost of capital for startups that currently negotiate compliance frameworks bilaterally.
The European Parliament’s ITRE committee has assigned the file to a rapporteur from the EPP group, and the first exchange of views is scheduled for the second week of June. The Polish presidency starting on 1 July inherits the file at a point where the central trade-off between national licensing autonomy and a single EU regime is unresolved, and the timetable for a Council general approach before the end of 2026 will depend on whether Toulouse, Rome, Bonn, and Luxembourg can converge on language around recognition of existing national regimes.
