Nov 26, 2010 10:15 GMT  ·  By

The Galileo satellite navigation system and the GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) initiative are the flagship programs of the European Space Agency (ESA) at this point, and European officials recently called for more actions to defined them as absolute priorities.

The announcement was made at the Seventh Space Council, which was held in yesterday, November 25, in Brussels. Representatives from both ESA and EU member states participated at the meeting.

Giuseppe Pizza, the Italian State Secretary in the Ministry of Education, University and Research, co-chaired the Council on behalf of the ESA Council at Ministerial Level.

The other co-chair was the Belgian Minister of Small and Medium Enterprises, the Self-employed, Agriculture and Science Policy, Sabine Laruelle.

At the meeting, participants introduced a resolution that called for the European space program to enable more economic growth in the near future. The document was approved unanimously.

It also stated that the program will need to be more in tune with public policy objectives, and that it will have to lead to a more concrete development of science and technology vocations in Europe.

Also included in the proposal where a series of key activities and projects related to the development of Galileo and GMES, which space experts identified as being essential to these European priorities.

The last Council took place in May 2009, and Jean-Jacques Dordain, the director general at ESA, emphasized in a speech the huge progress that the agency made in the past few months.

“The entry into force of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, with a specific space competence, is good news for space, good news for Europe and good news for ESA,” he said.

“It allows us not to do the same thing differently but to do more, together,” the official added. The Space Council is established under a EU-ESA Framework Agreement.

The Galileo project is Europe's response to the American-produced Global Positioning System (GPS). The Old Continent is working hard on setting up its own space positioning network.

Work on developing the necessary satellite technology is ongoing, and the first demo satellites are to be launched in a couple of years. Both Russia and China are developing their own navigation systems too.

The GMES is an effort to make Europe autonomous and competitive on an operational level in the field of Earth observations. Several satellites have already been launched through this cooperation.