Tag Archives: Geopolitics

France hopes to sell a high-resolution Earth observation satellite to Uzbekistan when President Shavkat Mirziyoyev is hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace on 9 October 2018.

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 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.

Jean-Yves Le Gall, the President of the French national space agency the Centre national d'études spatiales (CNES), has revealed details about the proposed Franco-Indian satellite-based maritime surveillance constellation that will provide Paris and New Delhi with maritime domain awareness (MDA) data across the Indian Ocean.

The Indian government cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been briefed about a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between India and the Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam covering space cooperation and the establishment of a telemetry, tracking, and command (TT&C) station in the Southeast Asian country for orbiting satellites and launch vehicles.

The Philippines will soon sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Russian national space agency, Roscosmos, that will allow the Southeast Asian country to launch the micro- and nanosatellites it is developing, as well as be a site for a receiving station of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) – Russia's positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) satellite constellation that is the equivalent of, and rival to, the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS).

Myanmar is mulling creating its own national space agency and the acquisition of an Earth observation small satellite with the assistance of Hokkaido University in Japan. Myanma engineers and scientists are set to take part in the manufacture and integration of some the components and instruments, according to reports in the Myanma media.

Moroccan media is reporting that the North African country's second high-resolution Earth observation satellite, the Mohammed VI-B, is due to be launched on an Arianespace launch vehicle from the Kourou Space Centre in French Guiana in November 2018 on either the Vega or Soyuz ST-A Fregat-M satellite launch vehicles.

In a textbook example of how cyber activity is often a mirror of geopolitics, a Turkish hacktivist group called Ayyildiz Tim has been accused of hacking and then hijacking the social media accounts of prominent U.S. journalists to spread messages in support of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Japanese government has issued the 2018 policy guidelines for national defence that emphasises the growing threats emanating from China, North Korea, and Russia in the cyberspace and space domains.