President Macron gives Pedro Sanchez one year to decide whether to replace the Helios 2 with the more advanced CSO

Madrid finalises agreement with Paris to use new French CSO spy satellites

photo_camera PHOTO/Chistian Hartmann-Reuters - Emmanuel Macron will withdraw from service in December 2021 the Helios 2 spy satellites in which Spain has a 2.5% share. If Pedro Sánchez's government has not joined the French CSO programme or found another alternative, the Spanish armed forces will be left without optical images

The Spanish and French governments are finalising the details of a bilateral agreement that will enable the Ministry of Defence to join the third generation of French military reconnaissance satellites, colloquially known as spies, whose second platform has just been placed in orbit.

Meanwhile, the president, Pedro Sánchez, and his defence minister, Margarita Robles, are extending the use of the veteran French spy satellites Helios 2A and 2B, which the French defence department shares with Germany, Italy, Belgium, Greece and Spain, to the limit of what is possible. 

Placed in space in December 2004 and 2009 respectively, both Helios 2 are already at the end of their useful lives and Paris is therefore replacing them with the more advanced CSOs -acronym for Composante Spatial Optique- whose second CSO-2 was placed yesterday, 29 December, at an altitude of 480 kilometres. It teams up with its twin CSO-1, in orbit since 19 December 2018, but located 800 kilometres from the Earth's surface.

La adhesión al programa CSO ya se contempla desde marzo de 2016 en el Plan Director de Sistemas Espaciales del ministerio de Defensa. Pero ninguna decisión se ha tomado hasta el momento

The launch of the CSO-2 coincides with the decision by the French Ministry of Defence headed by Florence Parly to terminate the transmission of Helios 2 images to Germany, Italy and Belgium, the three countries that have already joined the CSO project. The same is not true of Greece and Spain, which have not yet made their entry into the initiative led by Paris official. That is why the French authorities have announced that they will "maintain for another year" the delivery of Helios 2 images to the Greek and Spanish armed forces.

As a result, the Council of Ministers has until the end of 2021 to authorise Spain's entry into the CSO programme, an alternative which has been included in the Ministry of Defence's Master Plan for Space Systems since March 2016. If this is not done, and with the Spanish optical satellite Ingenio destroyed on 17 November, another similar alternative would have to be found. The government and the National Intelligence Centre run by Paz Esteban cannot do without very high-resolution optical and infrared images of the geographical areas of strategic interest to Spain, particularly the Mediterranean basin, North Africa and the Canary Islands. 

Junto a un modelo a escala del satélite espía CSO y del jefe de Estado Mayor del Ejército del Aire y del Espacio, general del Aire Philippe Lavigne, la ministra Florence Parly explica las claves de la Estrategia Espacial de Defensa de Francia, de la que carece España
Reduce the bill with Paz's radar images

Nor can the Spanish armed forces rule out the use of high-resolution spy satellites. In order to direct operations abroad, the Operations Command of the Defence Staff commanded by Air Lieutenant General Francisco Braco requires the detailed examination of images by intelligence analysts. 

The Spanish-French agreement would put an end to the lengthy negotiations that had been dragging on for over four years when María Dolores de Cospedal held the defence portfolio in Mariano Rajoy's government. Among the main issues separating Spain's Secretary of State for Defence, Esperanza Casteleiro, and France's Directorate-General for Armaments, Joël Barre, is the way in which Spain must pay its entry fee and the annual fees for access to the use of CSO's very precise electro-optical eyes. 

El satélite espía CSO-2 ha viajado al espacio encerrado en la parte alta del lanzador ruso Soyuz que el lunes, 29 de diciembre de 2020, lo ha colocado en órbita

Margarita Robles' team takes on board the criteria of María Dolores de Cospedal, her predecessor in the position, which is to reduce as much as possible the bill of some 150 million euros for the rights to program and receive electro-optical images from the CSOs. The aim is to make it possible to pay not only in cash but also in kind, as Germany and Italy have done.

France is providing images in the visible spectrum to its two allies in exchange for receiving radar images of the future space constellation SARah and the current SAR-Lupe from Germany and the also Italian radar COSMO-SkyMed NG. In order to achieve the same result, the minister, Margarita Robles, her secretary of state, Esperanza Casteleiro, and the director general of Armaments and Material, Admiral Santiago Ramón González, are fighting to substantially reduce CSO's access and employment costs by providing images of the Spanish radar satellite Paz of the operator Hisdesat, whose main customer is the Ministry of Defence.

If the agreement between Madrid and Paris is reached, another important investment remains to be made. With CSOs with a great capacity to discriminate against objects "in the 35-centimetre range", according to French officials, the equipment at the Air Force's Centre for Aerospace Observation Systems (CESAEROB) at Torrejón air base will have to be thoroughly renewed.

La ministra francesa Florence Parly se reunió en Madrid el 24 de septiembre pasado con la titular de Defensa española Margarita Robles. Entre los asuntos que trataron se encontraba la situación del acuerdo bilateral relativo al CSO
Germany is the preferred partner

This action will have to be carried out by the Spanish space industry, which will have to update the processes for receiving, processing and analysing the data and images downloaded from the CSOs. This is a priority to be able to extract the maximum performance from its features, since the new French mills can obtain very high and extreme resolution 3D images in the visible and infrared spectra, and even take video images. 

The powerful new electro-optical eye CSO-2 of 3.562 kilos took off on board a Russian Soyuz launcher on December 29th, exactly at the scheduled time, 17:42 and 7 seconds Spanish peninsular time, 5 hours less in French Guiana. One hour later, the CSO-2 was already positioned near its final orbital position, from where the French technicians have begun operations so that it can enter service by mid 2021 at the latest.

El CSO-1 lanzado el 19 de diciembre de 2018 está a 800 kilómetros de altura, mientras que el CSO-2 puesto en órbita el 29 de diciembre de 2020 gravita a 480 kilómetros de la Tierra

With an investment by the French state of around 1.3 billion euros, the CSO military space reconnaissance system consists of three platforms, two of which are already in orbit. The third is the CSO-3, which has a contribution of 200 million euros from Angela Merkel's federal government, making Germany a preferential partner in the programme since the Schwerin agreements of 2002. 

The CSOs have been developed by Airbus Space Systems France and are the evolution of the 70-centimetre resolution Pleiades dual-use satellites. With the external shape of an irregular hexagonal prism, they are fitted with three solar panels, have an autonomous control system on board to facilitate their manoeuvres in space and their advanced sensors for taking extremely precise photographs are the work of Thales Alenia Space France, the European specialist in this field. 

Coloquialmente llamados satélites espía, las plataformas dedicadas al reconocimiento militar proporcionan datos clave para la toma de decisiones en beneficio de las unidades terrestres, navales y aéreas españolas bajo bandera de la OTAN, Naciones Unidas o la Unión Europea

While the CSO-2 gravitates at 480 kilometres, its brother CSO-1 gravitates at 800 kilometres, as will the CSO-3 which will be launched at the end of 2021 or early in 2022. The reason for being at a much shorter distance from the earth is that its main task is to precisely identify the targets located by CSO-1, which it achieves by reducing the strip of land observed by almost half.

Sweden has also joined the CSO programme, whose contribution is also largely in kind. The Stockholm government is making it easier for France to use the Salmijärvi polar station, which is about 30 kilometres from the city of Kiruna, 140 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle and 1200 kilometres north of the Scandinavian capital. This is where the large antennas, 15 and 13 metres in diameter, receive and send the S- and X-band signals to the French military satellites.

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