World leaders, scientists, and industry executives converged on the Grand Palais in Paris on Wednesday for the International Space Summit, a two-day gathering convened by French President Emmanuel Macron to advance European strategic autonomy in space. Around 2,000 participants from more than 120 countries are taking part, with delegations confirmed from India, China, Africa, and beyond. The summit is structured around four pillars: defence and security, space economy, space regulation, and scientific exploration.

The event reflects a broader ambition to cement Europe's independent role in a rapidly changing sector, at a time when private actors — led by American and Chinese companies — are reshaping access to space. France's Minister Delegate for Europe, Benjamin Haddad, emphasised the urgency of European self-reliance, pointing in particular to the continent's investment in its own launch vehicles and communications infrastructure. Central to that effort is IRIS² (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity, and Security by Satellite), a planned European constellation of 264 low-orbit and 18 medium-orbit satellites, expected to be operational by 2030, designed to provide secure sovereign communications as an alternative to US and Chinese systems. Other flagship European projects on the agenda include the Ariane 6 rocket, the Galileo navigation system, and the Copernicus Earth-observation programme — all backed by the European Space Agency's budget of €22 billion over three years.

The strategic dimension of the summit is hard to overstate. Satellite constellations have become indispensable to modern military operations, as demonstrated vividly in Ukraine, where the American Starlink network proved critical to command-and-control communications — and whose temporary withdrawal from Russian forces in 2025 caused significant operational disruption. Russia has announced plans for its own sovereign network, Rassvet, while China is pursuing a constellation of 13,000 military satellites. For Europe, IRIS² is designed to close that gap.

The summit does, however, carry some notable absences. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose attendance would have underscored the Franco-German backbone of European space ambition, is absent due to domestic political pressures — even as Germany recently became the first European country where a private firm successfully launched a satellite into orbit. More symbolically, neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin, the dominant American commercial space companies, will be present, though the Élysée Palace has indicated that announcements involving American firms are expected during the summit. Three international declarations — covering space safety, radio-frequency coordination, and the use of space data — are expected to be adopted by the close of proceedings.

For developing nations, the stakes are equally significant. African heads of state, including the presidents of Rwanda, Djibouti, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are attending a summit that speaks directly to their continent's needs: satellite data is already being used across Africa for border surveillance, environmental monitoring, and agricultural planning, and the African space market is projected to reach nearly $40 billion by 2030. The Paris summit, in that sense, goes beyond European ambition — it is also a bid to shape the global governance of space before the rules of a new era are written without them.