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After the launch: The in-orbit services gap Europe hasn't filled
EU and NATO have started defining what "after the launch" should look like. Europe's industrial base has not yet matched the policy framing.
EU and NATO have started defining what "after the launch" should look like. Europe's industrial base has not yet matched the policy framing.
European policymakers now talk about "in-space operations and services" the way they used to talk about launchers. The phrase shows up in Brussels strategy papers and NATO communiqués. The supply chain, the investor class, and the procurement contracts that would make it real have not followed.
That gap is the story after the launch.
The argument lands in a SpaceNews opinion piece by Rosa Schmidt, founder of the Paris-based strategic communications firm DEFEM Agency. The piece makes a structural point: Europe has spent two decades securing independent access to orbit, first through Ariane, more recently through Vega and the planned Ariane 6. That work is unfinished but recognizable. What comes next is less recognized, and Schmidt argues it is more strategically consequential: keeping the satellites that are already up there alive, inspectable, refuellable, and removable when their missions end.
The strategic layer in question sits roughly 36,000 kilometers above the equator, in geostationary orbit. That is where many of the most valuable communications and defense satellites operate, including Europe's own. When something goes wrong at that altitude, the operator usually cannot see it directly. Diagnosis has to happen from the ground, and repair has historically meant sending a replacement.
A circular model would change that math. Under it, satellites are designed to be approached, inspected, refuelled, and given new components, or to be deorbited deliberately at end of life. The dominant model today is still linear: design, launch, run until failure, deorbit or abandon. Schmidt frames the transition from one to the other as one of the most consequential shifts underway in the space sector, on the same scale as the move from experimental to commercial launch in the 1990s.
The commercial maturity of the circular model is still partial. Infinite Orbits, a Singapore-headquartered company with engineering operations in Toulouse, France, has flown what it calls the first commercial nanosatellite to operate in geostationary orbit, the company said in the SpaceNews piece. The mission, OrbitGuard1, is a demonstration. Schmidt's broader claim, that commercial in-orbit servicing is "starting to happen," is forward-looking and rests on company disclosures rather than independent operator data.
Brussels and NATO have begun to formalize the layer the circular model depends on. The European Commission proposed an EU approach on Space Traffic Management in February 2022, and the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking capability already provides collision-avoidance services to more than 260 European spacecraft, according to the European Commission's EU Space Programme page. NATO, for its part, adopted an Overarching Space Policy in 2019 and declared space an operational domain. More than half of the active satellites in orbit belong to NATO members or companies headquartered on their territory, the alliance notes in its official topic page on space. NATO relies on member-state assets rather than building its own fleet.
The institutional direction is coherent. The industrial direction is harder to defend. The SpaceNews piece argues that the United States, through DARPA and the US Space Force, Japan, and China have invested earlier and more heavily in proximity operations and in-orbit servicing, and that European capability has lagged. Specific 2024-2026 program status across those countries was not independently verified and should be treated as the author's framing rather than established fact.
The relevant European gap is not policy. It is procurement, capital, and the industrial base that turns a framework label into a functioning supply chain. The Commission's "in-space operations and services" framing and its 2022 Space Traffic Management proposal are not interchangeable terms, and the institutional architecture that would connect them has not been published in detail.
That leaves a choice, and the choice is genuinely open. If Europe treats in-orbit servicing, refuelling, inspection, life extension, and active debris removal as a strategic sector, it can still build the suppliers, the test ranges, the regulatory regime, and the anchor customers that an ISOS industry needs. The same logic that justified Ariane in the 1970s and Galileo in the 1990s applies: a service that is going to be critical to European governments and operators should not be sourced exclusively from providers outside Europe.
The alternative is dependency. As more geostationary satellites reach the end of their design lives in the late 2020s, and as low-Earth-orbit constellations thicken, the demand for proximity operations and end-of-life disposal will grow. Whichever supplier base answers that demand first, US, Japanese, Chinese, or European, will set the technical standards, the price points, and the regulatory defaults for the next two decades. The circular orbital economy will have an address. The question for Brussels is whether it will be a European one.
What to watch next: the Commission's progress on the 2022 Space Traffic Management proposal, the first independent verification of OrbitGuard1's on-orbit status, and whether any European prime contractor publishes a concrete in-orbit servicing demonstration timeline for 2026 or 2027.