Sunday 05 December 2021 6:38 pm | Updated: Sunday 05 December 2021 6:39 pm

Elon Musk is being allowed to ‘make the rules’ in space warns ESA

Elon Musk has said he believes AI is “one of the biggest threats” to humanity, and that the UK’s AI Safety Summit was “timely” given the scale of the threat.

The chief of the European Space Agency (ESA) has warned that governments are allowing tech billionaire Musk to “make the rules” in space.

Josef Aschbacher, who took over as director general of the ESA in March, has urged European leaders to stop permitting Elon Musk to dominate the space economy in comments to the Financial Times.

Aschbacher said that Europe’s willingness to help Musk expand his Starlink satellite internet service could harm competitor’s in the region from capitalising on the commercial opportunities presented by space.

“Space will be much more restrictive [in terms of] frequencies and orbital slots,” Aschbacher confirmed in an interview with the Financial Times. “The governments of Europe collectively should have an interest to . . . give European providers equal opportunities to play on a fair market.”

Germany has applied to the International Telecommunications Union, to request permission for Starlink to launch around 40,000 satellites. The leading European economy is also offering subsidies to Starlink for providing broadband to rural communities. Across the pond in the US, Musk has already won approval for more than 30,000 satellites. In a bid to take his broadband service global the celebrity entrepreneur also plans to apply for a licence in India.

“You have one person owning half of the active satellites in the world. That’s quite amazing. De facto, he is making the rules. The rest of the world including Europe . . . is just not responding quick enough,” Aschbacher warned.

Starlink is competing with OneWeb, a company backed by the UK government, to create a mega-constellation of low earth orbit satellites in order to improve broadband service.

Amazon’s Project Kupier and the Chinese government also have plans to launch satellites which orbit close to the Earth.

While providing broadband services is a major drive for the launch of low earth orbit satellites falling costs are leading to plans for commercial services to be conducted from satellites including Earth observation.

As of yet, there is scarce governance of space fuelling the ESA’s concerns that Starlink’s dominant role in the space race will allow Musk to set the agenda.