Policy and Law

India and Morocco signed Memoranda of Understandings on space and cyber security cooperation in New Delhi on 25 September 2018, it has been announced.

Space activities are risky and challenging by their nature due to their reliance on highly sophisticated technologies, and the impact of a variety of factors on their successful conduct and significant investments at stake.

An event, held alongside the 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly, engaged world leaders to highlight the importance of space as a “driver for peace and sustainable development on Earth, as a driver for innovative space diplomacy and as the New Frontier for Peace on Earth”.

China's government is considering building a commercial space launch centre for the country's New Space private launch companies, a number of which will be attempting their first orbital flights by the end of 2018, according to a report by Andrew Jones in GBTimes.

The UAE Space Agency is preparing a comprehensive strategy for investing in the country's space sector, in cooperation with relevant UAE federal and individual Emirate authorities, and which will be released in October 2018.

Angola's National Space Programme Management Office (GGPEN) has revealed that it is using capacity on third-party communications satellites paid for by Russia as part of a compensation package for the failure in orbit of AngoSat-1 four months after its launch in late 2017, according to a report in the French-language technology news service Agence Ecofin.

China's Institute of Aerospace Information Research has helped ten countries install virtual ground stations in order to receive remote sensing data, it was announced last week.

The governments of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are considering the joint construction and operation of a communications satellite, and are also looking at proposing a Central Asian Earth observation satellite constellation consisting of five satellites.

The past few years have seen the satellite press column inches dominated by excited talk of new mega constellations. We have learned how thousands of small satellites are going to transform connectivity for billions around the world. I should know, I am one of the people that have been excitedly scribbling about it. But now that the dust has settled on the flurry of news of the constellations that are in the pipeline, where are we now?

The Philippines is on the verge of creating its own national space agency after a prominent Filipino politician sponsored legislation in the Senate plenary of Senate Bill 1983, or the “Act Establishing the Philippine Space Development and Utilization Policy and Creating the Philippine Space Agency, and for other Purposes,” earlier in September 2018.