How is the Space education offering in Europe? Our findings in a nutshell

The EuroSpaceHub project monitors the status of educational offerings in aerospace and entrepreneurship. By studying the characteristics of the ecosystem, we want to help young professionals and startups with their careers to produce innovation and generate value in the Space Tech industry. For this reason, in phase 1 of the project we actively engaged in a careful analysis of the Aerospace ecosystem to identify opportunities and areas of action.

The growth of the Space research and industry has led to increasingly diverse educational offerings in Europe. This regards courses that range from Space Law and Business oriented training, to more traditional Science and Engineering programs. The European Space Policy Institute (ESPI) released a detailed report on the panorama of European space education in March 2022, including bachelor’s and master’s degree programs, doctoral programs and other space-related initiatives.

Space programs abound in the largest European Union (EU) countries. At the top ranks for number of courses are France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Most countries, however, offer fewer than 20 space-related programs. According to the ESPI report, there are 538 space-related masters in Europe. Notably, Paris, Toulouse and Madrid, host more than 20 of those programs each.

An important fact highlighted by the report is that most of the educational offerings are in the Aerospace engineering and Space sciences. Law, economics and social programs related to Space activities account for a small fraction of the total offerings. There is, however, one exception. It concerns Austria, where the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs is based. However, apart from the exceptional case of Austria, overall the data suggest that there is a small number of multidisciplinary programs: only 18% of the total offerings at the bachelor’s and master’s level.

Traditionally, most master’s degrees in engineering provide the basic business and management training needed to start a business. However, there is a limited amount of mixed profiles in Space engineering or Science, and business studies in European master’s programs.

In our analyses, we particularly focused on Space Entrepreneurship and academic offerings: stay connected with our blog and socials to learn more about our findings in the next days!

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