Our European friends Germany and France don't want to cooperate with Sweden on tracking and protecting communication satellites against space junk. Sweden is an unreliable and spying partner that harms French and German interests.
This is because that would force France and Germany to enable Sweden access to some military infrastructure. Because Sweden has a national security policy that is most likely seen as harmful to French and German industrial interests and security interests, they will not trust us to do that.  Â
We have something like 17000 space junk objects that threaten our television providers, communication providers, GPS service providers and their primary communication tools: satellites. Sweden should, and indeed must, want to cooperate with France and Germany on protecting satellites from space junk. It is in our own interest that we, together with other European countries, can keep our satellites and those of our companies' operational and safe.
Instead Sweden prioritizes to support, through its national security agency, an American insecurity industry that doesn't create neither Swedish nor European jobs, and which does not want to pay taxes in Europe, and additionally makes European SMEs and companies afraid to use the internet.
Space junk in Sweden is handled by the Ministry of Education. Their message to me and the parliament has been that Sweden definitely wants space to be clean. It is therefore unfortunate that we have a big disconnect between national security policies and our other policies.
Alas, in Sweden the only person who is allowed by media to comment on national security issues is liberal spooksperson Allan Widman. He's a defence policy guy and is not so informed on educational policies. Because we define the problem of national security poorly in the public discourse, we also have a generally uninformed public and a political debate which really makes little sense.
Previously on space junk:
Mission: Space Debris (by Asta HelgasdottÃr). Explains the general problem very well.
Looking at EU Space Assets (by Julien Bencze). Explains the assets that we, the Europeans, desperately don't want to share with each other.
The working document and report on space debris for the European Parliament can be found here.
Yes, FRA do not work for Sweden. A lot of us have said this time and time again and proof does stack up. Just as a side note. I think that 17K junk objects is an understatement by orders of magnitude, here is why. You may remember some years ago when the Chinese was about to put their first man into space, they very proudly played this out on the big drum, so the whole world would look n listen. On the proud day, when they knew the world was listening and looking at what they did, they also did something else.. The shot one their own old communication satellites to pieces, from the ground. There was some outcry about this, making massive amount of junk debri in orbit arounf the earth, but i bet that Pentagon really saw the shit hit the fan, they ought to have understood another statement the chinese did. What the Chinese really said with this wrongdoing _when_they_knew_everybody_was_watching was: Look, we can with precision, shoot down satellites from the ground, including yours..
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