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One would have thought that outer space, a subject of fantasmagoric speculation for humanity across the millennia, would have lost its symbolic power when men tamed it. Meanwhile, conquest of space, from its beginning, has shown a transformation of this symbol, outer space becoming a powerful political and identitary symbol of the two systems personified by the USA and USSR, in competition during the cold war. Could outer space be by essence symbolic in its very nature ? The analysis of the European space dynamic and its eventual symbolic construction show this issue in a very different light, when compared with American and Soviet space policies. Space as a symbol thereof appears to be mainly the product of a social and historic context and of a specific political logic.