European Space Agency To Avoid Orbit Over West Bank, Gaza

Avoiding those areas will mean no passing over Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries, either, since almost any orbital paths over the occupied zones would involve passing over Israel immediately before or after.

Credit: NASA

Darmstadt, Germany, July 21 – The European intergovernmental agency that promotes and pursues space flight and space exploration has adopted new procedures for its space vehicles, most prominently a provision that no craft traverse any area of sky directly over territories occupied by Israel, lest that be considered an endorsement of Israel’s presence there.

The European Space Agency followed the lead of the European Union, its largest financial contributor, which this week voted to label all imported products originating in Israeli settlements beyond the 1948 ceasefire line. While Israeli-Palestinian agreements call for the final status of those areas and communities to be determined in negotiations, those negotiations have barely taken place over the last several years, with each side blaming the other for the continuing impasse. In the meantime, Europe has by and large decided to back the Palestinian claim to the land regardless of those agreements, and seeks to pressure Israel into acquiescing to Palestinian territorial demands. The space agency’s move will be implemented for every mission scheduled for launch after December of this year, and the directors of current, ongoing operations will be instructed to minimize wherever possible any orbit, launch, or reentry trajectories over the Gaza Strip. Golan Heights, and West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

In practice, say space flight officials, avoiding those areas will mean no passing over Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries, either, since almost any orbital paths over the occupied zones would involve passing over Israel immediately before or after. ESA officials called the result unfortunate, but necessary. “It is necessary to make this statement of non-endorsement of Israeli occupation, and if that requires us to seemingly non-endorse Israeli existence as well, that is a consequence we are willing to bear,” said ESA spokeswoman Ann de Semmitte. “All of our 22 member nations are behind this new set of procedures.”

Planners of future missions have scrambled to recalibrate the engineering on scheduled projects. “We’re scheduled to launch a climate-change monitoring satellite in a polar orbit to study Eastern Europe and East Africa – that’s going to have to be precisely engineered to avoid the problem zones,” said Director Bowie Cott. “Not that it can’t be done, but it adds a layer of computational complexity that we had not anticipated. Fortunately, we just acquired some new processors from some Israeli company that will help us speed up that calculations, and we should still be able to lift off on schedule.”

ESA officials were unable to provide information on any policies that would have its orbiters avoid the sky over Tibet, Western Sahara, Eastern Ukraine, Turkish-controlled Cyprus, and the Nagorno-Kabarakh region of Armenia/Azerbaijan.