OCTOBER 4 2024
Lost in Space?
A few words on the occasion of World Space Week
Today is the beginning of the World Space Week. 4 October marks the launch of the first man-made satellite, Sputnik-1, in 1957.
Luxembourg has its place in space... or at least it had. Ten years ago, the little Grand Duchy was making a name for itself on the international stage, with its numerous spacemining projects, nurturing startups and entrepreneurship. Politicians were touring the world, convincing international high-tech companies to incorporate in Luxembourg.
What has happened since? Although the map on the World Space Week website still shows Luxembourg (phew!),
the link leads to an unfortunately empty page*.
The topic of the World Space Week 2024 is climate change. Over the last few decades, space industry technologies have helped to constantly improve meteorology, with increasingly reliable forecasts and the construction of highly complex models.
And the stakes are high, because climate change is likely to lead to major migratory flows, hence creating new conflicts.
And here we come to the subject of defence. In Europe, this term has often been used to describe crises taking place ‘elsewhere’. But since 24 February 2022, defence took a whole new dimension with countless quantities of information delivered by satellites and budgets being massively increased.
Given today’s geopolitical context, space industry faces many challenges, but still has enormous potential ahead of it. The question therefore arises as to whether Luxembourg should revive its economic idea and fuel it with new energy.
(*The good news is that space will still have its place in our country, at the New Space Europe trade fair on 3 December.)
Text: Cyrille Horper
Picture: ChatGPT