Europe is facing increasingly significant challenges to cope with humanitarian crises, climate change, cybercrime, and geopolitical instability. The World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Risks Report puts extreme weather events and cybersecurity failures as the third and fourth most clear and present dangers to the world, ahead of any other economic, environmental or geopolitical risks. We need to act swiftly to further protect Europe’s citizens and institutions, and support critical infrastructures. With this in mind, ESA together with ESA Member states have elaborated on a need for a European flagship programme for ‘Civil Security from Space’ (CSS).
ESA’s objective is to conduct the R&D and IOV/IOD in a timeframe which would allow stakeholders to make use of the results and deploy their early services by 2025, leveraging on available assets augmented with new data fusion and system orchestration capabilities. This will be followed by new system elements including space segments, upgraded with innovations and further in-orbit demonstrations and validations of new enhanced capabilities by 2027. The capabilities would then be operated and exploited by institutional and commercial service providers in the different stakeholder and use case environments.
To support the progressive evolution of the solution and to simultaneously leverage on current available or under plan systems, the implementation of the programme will be phased. The phases are such that they enable the rapid R&D and IOD/IOV of a solution that can stimulate early services by service providers and operators to stakeholders by 2025.