The Europeans are gearing up for a fight in orbit.
This week, the European Defence Fund tapped French OTV startup OSMOS X to lead a coalition studying how countries can respond to threats in orbit. The 30-month study is backed by ~€4.5M ($5M).
The coalition brings together seven organizations across Europe, including France’s ArcSpace and CNRS; Germany’s KINETIK Space; Poznań University of Technology in Poland; and Politecnico di Milano in Italy.
Now, more than ever: The coalition won’t initially send anything to space—a preliminary design review is set to be its final deliverable. But the capabilities it’s studying are in high demand. Last week, European defense ministries watched as a Russian satellite got within 50 m of an ICEYE sat gathering intel over Ukraine.
While it’s not clear what the Russians were doing so close to ICEYE’s satellite, the situation highlighted just how unequipped the Europeans are to respond to similar threats in orbit.
“The defense fund is exactly aligned with a purpose to prove to the world that the European Union is capable—they have the capacity to do something: to observe, to listen to, and to act,” OSMOS X CEO Arnaud Masson told Payload.
The goal is to create a spacecraft that is capable of approaching, capturing, and even manipulating adversarial spacecraft with in-space welding, to deal with the immediate threat without causing debris.
Masson explained the coalition is targeting the ability to attach things like jammers or propulsion systems to non-cooperative spacecraft, breaking adversaries’ ability to spy on allied satellites, or forcing them into non-threatening orbits.
Arms race: While OSMOS X has yet to fly in space, the company expects to fly its first demonstration mission before the end of next year, where it will validate its high-power propulsion system that’s targeting 12,000 mps of total delta-V.
The propulsion system will form the backbone of the proposed defense spacecraft, and OSMOS X officials hope that once that the study is complete, nations across the continent will start ordering in bulk.
However, the coalition isn’t targeting a highly proliferated defense force. On the contrary, OSMOS X believes that it can achieve complete coverage of GEO with just four satellites.
“The scenario that we are targeting today: two vehicles per year, two-year lifetimes. [This] means four vehicles always in space, [and] with this number of vehicles, we can go to any position [in GEO] in less than two days,” Masson said.
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