ASTRAIOS is a Horizon Europe Cluster 4 Coordination and Support Action that successfully kicked-off in January 2023 and will run until December 2025. The main goal of the project is to provide an exhaustive view and understanding of the current and future offer of space curricula and courses in the EU-27, characterise the demand from European space industry in the next 10-15 years, and identify actionable ways towards the alignment of the European space sector’s curricula and qualification capabilities with skills required by the sector to foster innovation and increase EU competitiveness.

These goals will be achieved by mapping the educational offer across the EU-27 at Bachelor, Master, postgraduate, and continuing education levels and measuring the average time and cost required for a degree leading to a career in the space sector. A socio-economic analysis of the population of students enrolled in space-related studies will be performed, which together with the education data will create a Europe-wide space competencies and skills taxonomy to support the identification and analysis of the excellences and shortcomings within the European academic offer for the space sector.

The project will analyse future trends and challenges of the EU space sector through desk research, direct industry consultation and automated methods. The analysis will cover current and future needs in both, technical/hard skills and soft skills such as collaborative working, multidisciplinary approaches, and creative thinking that future European students need to develop. Final outputs will include recommendations of actions towards a better alignment between the European space sector’s curricula and the skills required by the future EU space sector, new materials to promote space related jobs and careers, and educational material developed for the Copernicus and Galileo sectors. The consortium in place to achieve this has extensive coverage of the EU-27 space education and industry sector.

Project website: https://www.astraios.eu