By Sarah Cope | 2026-02-19

With a 1.35 billion EUR ($1.6 billion) commitment to a new space security initiative, the European Space Agency (ESA) has shifted into a domain it has long avoided: defense.

The European Resilience from Space (ERS) program is framed as a necessary adaptation to the increasingly contested and crowded conditions in space.

For decades, the ESA has been the civilian counterpart to Europe’s military space efforts, concentrating on scientific exploration, Earth observation, and commercial services.

The agency's founding principles explicitly separated it from defense activities, but this central disambiguation is shifting.

The ERS program does not authorize the use or deployment of weapons in space, and it does not enable offensive capabilities.

Instead, it focuses on protecting extant assets, space situational awareness (SSA) and continuity of key space services, such as such as satellite communications, Earth observation data and GPS.

The policy change is an overt acknowledgement that orbital vulnerabilities translate into terrestrial risks, and occurs against a shifting strategic backdrop.

Russian interference

European governments have expressed alarm about Russia’s demonstrated counterspace capabilities, including satellite jamming, cyber interference, satellite stalking and testing of anti-satellite systems.

In February, news broke that several European space and intelligence agencies had observed a pattern of Russian interceptions of 17 major European satellites.

Reports indicate that two primary satellites have been observed participating in this behavior: Luch-1 (launched in 2014) and Luch-2 (launched in 2023).

Many of Europe’s orbiting satellites are older, and were launched before modern cybersecurity measures.

Intelligence officials are concerned that these less secure satellites are vulnerable to interference from Russian satellites.

This interference could include satellites being manipulated into the wrong flight path and being set up for collisions, or even sent plummeting back to Earth, according to Satnews.

Separately, ERS aims to address Europe's dependency on US space infrastructure, secure communications and missile-warning data by hardening the continent’s indigenous capabilities.

Space situational awareness

Central to the ESA’s growing capabilities is the substantial expansion of space situational awareness, which involves tracking, monitoring and predicting the positions of natural and man-made space objects.

Prior to signing off on ERS, the ESA already had incorporated military sensors into its expanded SSA network in an effort to monitor potential threats such as debris, hostile maneuvering satellites, and electromagnetic interference.

The goal is to provide European governments and operators with near-real-time insight into what is happening in orbit, thus reducing the risk of surprise, according to Breaking Defense.

ERS will bolster the resilience of Europe’s satellite constellations.

Its first phase will focus on developing dual-use technologies that can serve civilian and governmental security needs and feed into a proposed new network of Earth-observation satellites, dubbed Earth Observation Governmental Service.

In parallel, the ESA plans to advance a new generation of "navigation services" delivered from satellites in low Earth orbit.

Another pillar of the ESA’s goals is secure connectivity.

Europe’s forthcoming IRIS² constellation, described as a sovereign alternative to Starlink, aligns with ERS objectives.

By ensuring governments and critical infrastructure providers have independent, secure communications links, ESA hopes to insulate Europe from technical failures and potential leverage by external commercial and government actors.

European policymakers clearly view space as an extension of national and collective security.

ERS reflects a broader strategic shift that embraces space resilience as central to resilience on Earth. As ERS gets off the ground, future plans may include an expansion of other space-based and defense capabilities.