The Portuguese Space Agency signs this Tuesday, at the International Astronautical Congress, in Paris. a memorandum of understanding with the Ukrainian Space Agency to focus on developing kyiv’s space capabilities.
Ukraine needs a stable perspective to develop their skills. They are an important player, particularly in an area where we depend a lot on rocket launchers, in terms of engine propulsion,” Ricardo Conde, president of the Portuguese Space Agency, told Agência Lusa.
Portugal signs a memorandum of understanding with Ukraine on Tuesday after the country’s request to join the European Union, which was also extended to the European Space Agency. While preparing the long road to accession, Portugal decided to establish close ties with the Ukrainian space sector.
Even on our scale, we are also helping Ukraine on various levels, including in the space sector. But we are also developing cooperation, we launched public tenders for Ukrainian companies that wanted to come and develop skills in this sector for Portugal and Four nominations have already appeared.. Now we are going to promote them in our territory”, explained Ricardo Conde, referring to a contest held in May by the Pedro Nunes Institute and ANACOM.
The president of the Portuguese Space Agency admits, however, that on a global level, the conflict in Ukraine and the marginalization of the Russians in the space race have created new opportunities for Portuguese companies.
“Does it increase the opportunity for companies? It is increasing, in fact it will be seen at the next ministerial meeting of the European Space Agency where Portugal will be called to contribute to new programs”, he said.
However, Ricardo Conde hopes that this will be “a pause” in space scientific cooperation and that there will be no progress towards “deglobalization”, which leads the European Union to seek solutions among its member states for the time being.
“It would be dangerous to enter a phenomenon of deglobalization. Of course, this always gives us an opportunistic perspective that we hide with words like resilience and autonomy, which is dangerous. In the European Space Program we had dependencies on Russia, we had cooperation and they were well-intentioned partnerships, they always have been. But these circumstances led to the cutting of these dependencies, we found a way to understand how we can do this within the European community”, concluded Ricardo Conde.
Source: Observadora
