On 7th November 2023, SDA Director, Charles Law, presented the 2023 T.S. Kelso Award to EU Space Surveillance and Tracking (EU SST) in recognition of the organisation’s outstanding contributions to space flight safety. We sat down with Dr. Pascal Faucher, Chairman of the EU SST Partnership, to find out more about its critical work to maintain safety in space.
We’d like to begin by congratulating you and the entire EU SST team on winning the 2023 T.S. Kelso Space Safety Award. What does this mean to you?
On behalf of the EU SST Partnership, I would like to warmly thank the Space Data Association for this award. It is an honour to receive the T.S Kelso Award as it recognises our commitment to delivering public services in collision avoidance, re-entry, and fragmentation analysis. To do this, we are heavily relying on Member States capabilities (mainly military sensors) as well as on our vibrant and dynamic industry and start-ups ecosystem. As a component of the EU Space Programme, EU SST is supported by the European Commission and relies on EUSPA, which is acting as Front Desk.
Of course, this achievement is the result of a collective work across the 15 Member States of EU SST, relying on the best expertise in Europe, resulting from long-term investments in SSA (notably military investments). I want to deeply congratulate the national Operation Centres as well as the technical teams and experts. Our activities cover the entire value chain of the SSA domain, from operation of sensors to service provision, including the monitoring of the performance and the evolution of our systems through R&D and the upgrade of SST sensors.
I also want to thank the Ministries of Defence which contribute significantly to EU SST through the sharing of measurements. Today, military sensors account for 97% of measurements shared in EU SST.
Let’s talk more about EU SST. What is it and can you tell us about the reasons behind the establishment of the SST partnership?
The European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking Partnership (EU SST) was first established as a consortium of 5 Member States of the European Union through Decision Number 541/2014/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 April, 2014. On November 11, 2022, the EU SST Partnership succeeded the EU SST Consortium. In addition to France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Spain, the EU SST Partnership is now composed of eight new Member States: Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Latvia, the Netherlands and Sweden. Those fifteen Member States pool together their national sensors and invest at national level in space surveillance and tracking capabilities. The creation of the EU SST Partnership was foreseen in Regulation (EU) 2021/696 of the European Parliament and the Council of 28 April 2021 (the EU Space Regulation), where SST was established as a fully-fledged security subcomponent of the EU Space Programme, which is by nature a civilian programme.
From the beginning, we have created a cooperation between Member States to address and preserve sovereign security interests of the participating Member States within a civilian framework. That is why we have adopted an inherently dual governance structure. This not only ensures that sovereign security concerns are addressed through the participation of ministry of defence representatives and national security authorities in all strategic decisions in both the Steering Committee and the Security Committee, but also enables the integration and leverage of military and civil operational SST capabilities from the participating Member States. That includes sensors, operations centres and personnel. As a result, EU SST can benefit from military data, which represents most of the measurements shared within the Partnership.
The establishment of a dual governance structure also enables EU SST to deal with the security interests of the respective partners and allies of the participating Member States regarding the use and exchange of SST data and information by the Partnership through an internal Data Policy and security classification guidelines.
What services does EU SST offer to its users? Who can benefit from EU SST’s services and how do they access them?
In terms of operations, we continue to build and run an operational system 24/7 to provide public services in collision avoidance, re-entry and fragmentation analysis, relying of course on our industry.
Our user community comprises public and private spacecraft owner and operators and other public or private entities established in the European Union, as well as users from third-party countries and international organisations.
Regarding the collision avoidance service: since January 1st, 2023, EU SST has opened registration to international users – hence owners/operators established outside of the EU are also eligible to register to our public collision avoidance service.
Eligible users can register at https://portal.eusst.eu/
EU SST is a relatively new system, and you have taken a fresh approach to its development with a high level of interface with users. How has this helped you to shape the system and its capabilities?
EU SST is a well-established cooperation. The Consortium agreement marking its establishment was signed on July 16, 2015. We have 8 years of existence, and 7 years of operations behind us.
EU SST services have grown together with its user community. A solid understanding of the space environment and SST ecosystem has allowed us to build up a solid portfolio of public services free of charge delivered to more than 202 organisations – 64 registered to the collision avoidance service, 155 to the fragmentation analysis service, and 161 to the re-entry analysis service.
Several mechanisms are in place to ensure frequent interaction with our user community. We regularly collect feedback from our users to ensure the quality of our services. In the framework of our CA service, EU SST Operational Centres also engage in bilateral discussions with operators when necessary, in case of risky conjunctions. By listening to our users, EU SST is able to adapt its development to answer their needs.
Do you collaborate and share information with other space agencies?
First, we collaborate and share data and information on space objects and events between the Member States of the EU SST Partnership. The data collected by each Member States’ sensors are pulled together to form the EU SST database (in operation since April 2019). The exchange of classified and unclassified SST data and information within EU SST is regulated by an adequate Data Policy that takes into account national security constraints. In 2022, close to 200 million measurements were shared among the 7 members of the EU SST Consortium, amounting to an average of approximately 530 000 measurements per day.
The building of a European database is a significant achievement at European level. The sharing of SSA data between 15 nations on a routinely basis is absolutely unique in the world. This complex process requires a high level of trust among partners over the years and the overcoming of a plethora of technical challenges – related to the overlap of data, data format, timeliness of data, availability of sensors and quality of data, among others. Our common objective today is to accelerate and intensify the acquisition of correlated commercial SSA data in Europe.
Second, we collaborate and share information with our international partners. The United States remains Europe’s first partner in the SSA domain. EU SST and the Office of Space Commerce, currently developing the TraCSS system, engage in regular exchanges at expert level to address the similar challenges faced in the development of their respective SSA systems.
The issue of SST is becoming increasingly important given the sheer amount of satellites that are slated for launch, especially in LEO, over the coming months and years. How are you tackling this challenge today and also into the future when these constellations will scale so rapidly?
With the emergence of large constellations and the multiplication and diversification of space actors, space is becoming increasingly congested but also contested. Today, we already protect satellites from risks of collision with satellites from large constellations. For most of the risky conjunctions that include an active spacecraft as a secondary object (approximately 10% of all conjunctions, the remaining 90% concerning space debris), the secondary object is a satellite from a large constellation.
Given the increasing proportion of active vs active conjunctions, EU SST has established a Coordination and Communication platform to allow operators of active satellites to exchange and coordinate more easily. In the future we plan to have increasingly automated processes for large constellations.
EU SST is able to adapt to the rapidly changing space environment thanks to its operational capabilities and through an ambitious R&D plan that allows us to develop, together with the European industry and start-ups, state of the art technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud-computing, automatic collision avoidance and space-based surveillance systems (SBSS).
What are the main risks that you see in our orbits? What keeps you up at night?
Currently, EU SST protects 419 satellites of 55 operators from risks of collision in orbit. The first risk to be avoided absolutely is the loss of a satellite protected by the EU SST collision avoidance service.
Our top priority is to avoid a major catastrophic collision in orbit which would generate thousands of new debris and would therefore endanger all space activities over a long period of time – especially if such a collision happened in LEO. In Europe, we consider that there is a need for a fundamentally public collision avoidance service to avoid such catastrophic event and ensure a minimum level of safety in space.
That is why EU SST has opened the collision avoidance service worldwide starting from January 1st, 2023. This is a political decision made by the 27 Member States of the European Union, along with European Parliament, Council of the European Union and European Commission, following Article 8 of the Regulation establishing the Union Space Programme.
Our objective in Europe is to contribute to the global burden sharing in the SSA domain through a regional SSA approach and through acting as a reliable and capable partner. We are all part of this game, and none of us can do that alone.
What further developments do you hope for in terms of SST in the future?
We are lacking budget in Europe; we need to increase the level of investment in the SSA domain to reach a high level of strategic autonomy. Today, we are taking the right decisions with investment at different levels.
First, Member States heavily invest at national level in the upgrade of national sensors. For instance, the Graves NG radar (France), the FlyEye optical network (Italy), S3TSR (Spain) and Gestra (Germany) will be upgraded in the next years, with a high level of national co-funding going from 55 to over 90%, for a total investment of several hundred million euros. Those sensors contribute to help Europe reach a high level of strategic autonomy in the SSA realm – especially in LEO.
Second, EU SST invests on the development of commercial SSA capabilities, with the objective to consolidate an SSA ecosystem in Europe. EU SST acts as a public anchor customer and a public investor through dedicating a total of 70 M€ to open European calls covering the entirety of the value chain – from commercial data provision to the development of innovative commercial sensors, to R&D activities. Commercial capabilities are expected, in turn, to strengthen our strategic autonomy.
Third, the European Defence Fund invests at European level on the development of military SSA sensors. Those military sensors will contribute to both military communities and civil ones – such as EU SST. Hence, we can leverage the dual-use of space technology to avoid unnecessary duplications and exploit synergies between civil and defence in the SSA domain at sensor level – thereby optimising our limited budgets in Europe.
We are making the right choices in Europe. I am very optimistic about the level of European strategic autonomy in the SSA domain at the end of this decade. Our challenge is to coordinate investments between all sources of funding, within Member States and at the EU level, to maximise our level of strategic autonomy. My hope is that the budget dedicated to European SSA will increase in the next Multiannual Financial Framework, to accelerate the strengthening of our strategic autonomy, building on our strong legacy.