The President of the French national space agency (Centre national d’études spatiales – CNES), Jean-Yves Le Gall, and Lim Cheol-Ho, President of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), in the presence of Agnès Pannier-Runacher, Secretary of State to the Minister of the Economy and Finance, and Fabien Penone, France’s Ambassador to South Korea, opened the third France-Korea Space Forum in Seoul on 17 May 2019.
Organized by CNES, KARI and South Korea’s Ministry for Science and ITC (MSIT) with the support of the French Embassy on the theme of ‘Expanding the Cooperation Network’, this forum brought together some 200 French and Korean specialists from academia, research centres, space agencies manufacturers and start-ups.
The event follows on from the dialogue at the second France-Korea Space Forum, held in Paris on 3 April 2018. Among the topics addressed were ‘Space and the 4th Industrial Revolution’, ‘Industry for New Services’ and A Way Forward for Humanity’. Speaking during the round table on ‘Public Strategies in the NewSpace era’, Jean-Yves Le Gall detailed CNES’s strategy and its cooperation with South Korea in the new international space context.
CNES’s President underlined the crucial role of space agencies in improving citizens’ daily lives and meeting society’s new needs. NewSpace is providing new momentum to make space a flourishing sector of the economy. In this context, CNES is tailoring its strategy and positioning itself as a partner of choice and innovation hub for users of space technologies. Through its ConnectbyCNES initiative, CNES is canvassing the needs of users likely to benefit from space solutions. Partnerships with competitiveness clusters and incubators are enabling the agency’s experts to help start-ups to develop their business, notably through licences to use technologies developed by CNES’s programmes.
CNES has forged close institutional and industrial ties with South Korea and is focusing on climate research, a key element of this partnership and a priority area for France and South Korea to which the space sector is contributing. This cooperation has resulted in the signature of a tripartite agreement between CNES, KARI and the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) on climate change research in October 2018, on the occasion of President Moon’s state visit to France, and the participation of Korea’s agencies at the international meeting on the Space Climate Observatory (SCO) in February in Paris. Jean-Yves Le Gall then encouraged French and Korean firms to work together on developing space applications and with all sectors using satellite Earth-observation and navigation data.
In all, the success of this third Space Forum has further consolidated space cooperation between France and South Korea, giving it fresh momentum to exploit the potential that space applications offer.
