Recently, the European Commission supported by many European countries has announced large investments towards the commercialization of quantum technology (QT) to address and mitigate some of the biggest challenges facing today’s digital era – e.g. secure communication and computing power. For more than two decades the QT community has been working on the development of QTs, which promise landmark breakthroughs leading to commercialization in various areas. The ambitious goals of the QT community and expectations of EU authorities cannot be met solely by individual initiatives of single countries, and therefore, require a combined European effort of large and unprecedented dimensions comparable only to the Galileo or Copernicus programs. Strong international competition calls for a coordinated European effort towards the development of QT in and for space, including research and development of technology in the areas of communication and sensing. Here, we aim at summarizing the state of the art in the development of quantum technologies which have an impact in the field of space applications. Our goal is to outline a complete framework for the design, development, implementation, and exploitation of quantum technology in space.

最近，在许多欧洲国家的支持下，欧盟委员会宣布对量子技术 (QT) 的商业化进行大量投资，以解决和缓解当今数字时代面临的一些最大挑战——例如安全通信和计算能力。二十多年来，QT 社区一直致力于 QT 的开发，这有望实现具有里程碑意义的突破，从而在各个领域实现商业化。QT 社区的雄心勃勃的目标和欧盟当局的期望不能仅通过单个国家的个人倡议来实现，因此，需要欧洲的共同努力，规模空前，规模巨大，仅可与伽利略或哥白尼计划相媲美。激烈的国际竞争要求欧洲协调一致地努力在太空中发展 QT，包括研究和开发通信和传感领域的技术。在这里，我们旨在总结对空间应用领域有影响的量子技术发展的最新技术。我们的目标是为太空中量子技术的设计、开发、实施和利用勾勒出一个完整的框架。