Man has not waited for his planet to become a global village to dream of reaching the stars. But his approach to getting there will take time and the successes achieved are only the first steps of a conquest of which no one is in a position to imagine the future scope. Already, the place occupied by space has become indispensable to many applications that we would have the greatest difficulty in doing without. One thing is certain: the adventure of space will have no limits and no end.

Space inevitably gives those who conquer it the priority and the superiority to know, to monitor, to control, to protect, to prevent, to forbid, to hinder, to destroy, to overturn, to foresee, to inform, to broadcast, to guide, to look after, and so on. Those who have already mastered it, like those who will come to do so, will control the world and its relation to the universe.

With this firm conviction, at a founding seminar in April 2004 PanEurope France developed and strengthened its call for a great-power Europe equipped with the technologies of sovereignty. Since then, we have explained this concept to many French and European audiences, to a reception and indeed a degree of support which have encouraged us to widen the content. We have come to realise that it would no longer be enough to present the characteristics and technological progress of the space industry to arouse public opinion: we must now treat space as a major political fact, necessarily founded on an awareness of public opinion and on Europe’s will to respond to it.