Region

On Wednesday, 21 November 2018, at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall spoke at the opening of the first International VENµS End-Users Conference organized as part of the France-Israel Season 2018. On this occasion, in the presence of Avi Blasberger, Director General of the Israeli Space Agency (ISA), he underlined the innovative nature of CNES and ISA’s joint VENµS mission (Vegetation and Environment monitoring on a New Micro Satellite) and its contribution to the Space Climate Observatory (SCO), a CNES initiative supporting efforts to tackle climate change.

Satellite communications innovator and space gateway Goonhilly Earth Station has joined the consortium backing the SmartSat CRC (co-operative research centre), a proposed space research initiative which plans to drive the Australian space industry through satellite technologies and analytics.

China and Myanmar held their first science and technology cooperation meeting in Yangon, where they established a joint radar and satellite communications laboratory as part of the nascent China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, a part of the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

As an international relations scholar who studies space law and policy, I have come to realize what most people do not fully appreciate: Dealing with space debris is as much a national security issue as it is a technical one.

As climate change makes the Arctic region, also known as the High North, more navigable for conventional shipping and open to natural resource exploitation, so geopolitical competition between Arctic countries such as Canada, Russia, United States, and Scandinavian countries such as Norway intensifies.

The first of 320 satellites in the Chinese Hongyan low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites communications mega-constellation is expected to be launched by the end of 2018 on board a Long March-2D satellite launch vehicle, according to reporting by Andrew Jones in the GBTimes.

According to Euroconsult's latest report, China Space Industry 2018, the China space value chain had an estimated size of more than U.S.$16 billion in 2017, with the downstream market accounting for just over 85%. Satellite Navigation, one of the key satellite applications in China, was the main revenue generator in 2017, ahead of Satellite Communications and Earth Observation.

China launched two BeiDou-3 satellites on 19 November 2018, and in doing so it can provide basic global satellite positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services by the end of 2018. The basic service will first be offered to countries participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and offered globally at a later date.

During his recent visit to China, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and his Chinese counterparts signed a number of agreements that commit both countries to space, science, and technology cooperation.

Bahrain is likely to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on space cooperation with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in early 2019, in order to send Bahraini engineers to India for training in satellite technologies and manufacturing. The MoU, once signed, will further establish ISRO as a major player in Gulf Arab space ambitions.