The defense commission of the French National Assembly is having a series of hearings about the lessons learned so far from the Ukraine war, and has finally published the exchange with the head of Space Command.
To start off 2023, the Chief of Staff of the French Air Force organized a colloquium on Very High Altitude Operations, meaning operations between conventional airplane altitudes, under 20km, and "orbital space" above 100km. It featured Air Force officials, but also the companies and research institutes involved in developing platforms able to fly at these… Continue reading France debates its near-space policy
While Russia started invading Ukraine, French Space Command was holding its annual exercise, called ASTERX 22. The ministry of armed forces then gave a presentation to the press about the command and the exercise. Background on French military space policy The presentation started with an introduction of French military space. To readers of this site,… Continue reading ASTERX 22: France’s annual military space exercise
The French ministry of defense organized a roundtable on military space between a senior officer and three junior officers in different space-related organizations of the ministry. They detailed their thinking on SSA, intelligence, and conflict in space.
With the new French space policy to be announced in a few months, and likely including a heavy Space Situational Awareness (SSA) emphasis, a few companies were presenting their solutions at the 2019 Paris Airshow: Sodern is working with cubesat builder Hemeria and electronics expert CS on Hirondelles, a constellation of cubesats to do satellite-to-satellite… Continue reading Space Situational Awareness news from the Paris Airshow
Florence Parly, the French Minister of the Armed Forces, gave a speech about Space & Defence on September 7th, 2018.
France's top launch vehicle official talks about future developments for reusable rockets
A summary of a talk by two top French military space officials.
The French parliament recently had a hearing of the French Joint Commander for Space, and since I found it interesting, here is a quick summary as well as an English translation.
France currently has a vigorous earth observation industry, which captures a large part of the export market for reconnaissance satellites. It has not always been this way: contrary to the USA or the USSR, France has never had film-return optical satellites, and orbited its own space reconnaissance systems roughly 30 years later than them. In… Continue reading History of the French reconnaissance system
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