Kiruna: Operators who launch from northern Sweden already answer to a national space law. Under the draft European Union Space Act they would answer to a second rulebook as well, and that prospect explains why member states spent the spring rewriting the text rather than approving it.
The Council issued a progress report on 8 May 2026 that reads more candidly than most. Delegations praised the presidency compromise for cutting complexity, then listed the questions nobody has settled. Three stand out. How wide should the scope run. How should the regulation treat dual-use activities and the exemptions that follow from them. And who governs what, once national licensing authorities, the Commission and the EU Agency for the Space Programme all hold a piece of the file.
That third question carries the sharpest edge. Several capitals warned against building a parallel Union regulatory layer that duplicates procedures they already run. France, Austria, Denmark, Finland and Sweden each license launches and satellite operations today. A firm in Kiruna or Toulouse could end up filing twice for one mission, paying twice, and waiting twice as long. Simplification was the selling point of the proposal. Duplication would be its most damaging outcome.
The Commission tabled the Act in June 2025 with a straightforward argument. Roughly eleven national frameworks govern space activity across the bloc, each with its own thresholds for debris mitigation, cybersecurity and insurance. Non-EU operators selling services into the single market face almost none of them. A common set of rules would close that gap and give European manufacturers one compliance target instead of a dozen.
Industry mostly agrees with the diagnosis and worries about the dosage. Smaller constellation builders argue that debris and collision-avoidance requirements calibrated for large geostationary platforms would fall hardest on cubesat missions with thin margins. Insurers want clarity on liability thresholds before they price anything. Launch service providers want to know whether a suborbital flight counts.
The current draft would apply from 1 January 2030, with phase-in periods for existing operators. That date looks distant until you consider what has to happen first. Council and Parliament must agree a text. The Commission must then write delegated and implementing acts covering technical standards, and national authorities must staff up to enforce them. Four years is not generous for that sequence.
Parliament’s industry committee has been working the file since autumn 2025. Rapporteurs there push in the opposite direction from the more cautious capitals, favouring stronger environmental and resilience obligations rather than fewer. The trilogue, whenever it opens, will have to reconcile a Council that wants the regulation lighter with a Parliament that wants it firmer.
None of this stops the launches. Sweden’s Esrange complex continues to expand its orbital ambitions, and European operators keep filing constellation plans with national regulators. The rules will eventually catch up with the hardware. The open question is whether they arrive as one rulebook or as a twenty-eighth one stacked on top of the rest.
