Kiruna: The European Union’s first attempt to write a single rulebook for outer space is grinding through the slow gears of the legislative process, and the latest signals suggest the text is getting lighter rather than heavier. Ahead of a Competitiveness Council meeting late in May, member states circulated a progress report on the draft EU Space Act, with delegations broadly agreeing that the presidency’s compromise was moving in the right direction by cutting complexity. They also made clear that several issues remain unresolved and will need more work before any final position.
The Space Act, proposed by the Commission in mid-2025, is an ambitious piece of plumbing. It would harmonise national licensing regimes, set common safety and sustainability standards, and stitch together a genuine single market for space activities across a bloc where rules currently differ from one capital to the next. For European operators the promise is a single gateway rather than a patchwork of national authorisations. For the wider industry the appeal is predictability, the quality investors prize most when the assets in question cost hundreds of millions and orbit for years.
Not everyone reads the draft so warmly. Non-EU operators, and American companies in particular, have warned that some provisions land disproportionately on them. The proposed category for very large constellations carries extra requirements on propellant capacity that, critics note, no current European operator would trigger. Prescriptive limits on how reflective low-orbit satellites may be would weigh most on firms flying at lower altitudes to cut latency, while higher, less reflective European constellations escape the same scrutiny. The Commission rejects the charge of protectionism and frames the rules as neutral standards for a crowded and increasingly contested orbital environment.
In Parliament the file sits with the industry committee, where the rapporteur published a draft report in early March and the customary contest over amendments is now under way. The legislative train is a long one. Officials close to the process do not expect final adoption before the back end of the decade, which means the standards being argued over now will govern launches and constellations that today exist only on engineering slides.
The urgency behind the Act is not bureaucratic tidiness. Europe is simultaneously trying to deploy IRIS2, its planned multi-orbit constellation for secure government and commercial connectivity, a project meant to give the bloc sovereign capacity comparable to systems already flown by others. A continent building its own strategic space infrastructure has an obvious interest in writing the rules that infrastructure will operate under, rather than inheriting standards set elsewhere. The Act and the constellation are, in that sense, two halves of the same ambition.
The simplification now under way reflects a familiar tension in EU lawmaking between reach and ratifiability. A sweeping first draft signals seriousness; a leaner final text is what actually clears the Council and survives Parliament. Trimming reporting burdens and softening the sharper edges makes agreement more likely, but it also risks hollowing out the very harmonisation that justified the exercise. If every contested clause is sanded down to win consent, the single market for space could arrive as a frame without much inside it.
For now the direction of travel is clear even if the destination is not. Member states want the Act, they want it lighter, and they want the open questions closed before negotiations move into their decisive phase. The summer talks will show whether a workable balance between ambition and agreement is within reach, or whether Europe’s space rulebook is destined for the same long gestation as the satellites it hopes to govern.
