Following the Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council on an EU Approach for Space Traffic Management (STM) issued in February 2022, DG-DEFIS (The Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space) proposed the creation of a so-called EU Industry and Start-ups Forum (EISF) on STM. This forum is aimed at promoting the competitiveness of the European industrial sector working on STM and the precursor Space Surveillance and Tracking (SST) activities to achieve a higher level of strategic autonomy in Europe.

The forum's ambition is to ensure that all the potential capabilities and innovation offered by European companies are used to further develop the public services delivered by the EU SST. Additionally, it also serves as a transparent mechanism, teaming up the European Union’s space industry and start-ups with the EU SST and DG DEFIS’ policy-makers in regular and constructive dialogue.

Since then, four meetings have been made in Brussels in April & November 2023 and in February & May 2024. The impact of those meetings has been outstanding, involving tens of industries from all across the EU and more than 100 attendees to all meetings both on site and online.

As part of these meetings, three working groups have been created within the EISF for the provision of commercial data to the EU SST, for the development of innovative commercial sensors and value chain (data processing capabilities) and for the definition of new services.

Thus, being a key provider of technology, products and services to the EU SST system, GMV has been present to all these EISF meetings with several colleagues. Additionally, expert GMV staff are co-chairing, on behalf of European large industries, two of these three working groups, thus proving our leadership in this domain.

All in all, over 100 GMV engineers currently work at GMV on SST and STM activities in 7 European countries, making it the largest industry and team in Europe in this field. GMV supports intensively the EU SST endeavors in Spain (for CDTI), France (for CNES), Germany (for DLR), Romania (for RoSA), Poland (for POLSA) and in Portugal (for PT-MoD).