The European Commission has proposed a new regulation, the EU Space Act, to strengthen safety, resilience, governance, and competitiveness of space activities in the EU market. While the legislation primarily aims to enhance security, sustainability, and regulatory coherence, it also introduces new compliance requirements for firms operating in the European space economy. In its associated impact assessment the EU identifies a range of additional costs imposed on private space businesses across the EU value chain.
This report assesses the economic implications of these measures by exploring the downstream effects of these cost increases on prices, demand, investment activity, research and development, and capital expenditure.
We model these effects not only for individual product segments in the local European space market, but also for US and Chinese exports into the EU.
This report thus provides a first quantitative assessment of how the EU Space Act may affect the competitiveness, investment capacity, and long-term growth prospects of the European space sector, while also quantifying spillover impacts on international exporters to the EU.
The report proceeds in three stages:
