27 FEBRUARY 2019 Master students and others got an extraordinary insight into how advanced space technologies can provide innovative strong solutions and new business on Earth, through presentations by seven world-leading space agencies at the International Space University last week.
Organised by ESA, the 2019 annual meeting of the Space Agencies Technology Transfer Officers (SATTO) group was hosted by the International Space University (ISU) in Strasbourg.
The President of ISU Juan de Dalmau opened the day with a warm welcoming note highlighting the importance of technology transfer and innovation from the space sector to our societies and the importance of a international, intercultural and interdisciplinary perspective to optimize the benefits.
This was followed by officers from JAXA, ESA, NASA, CNES, CSA, ASI and ISA presenting insight and exchanged knowledge and experiences in strategies, methods and challenges faced, leading up to a morning panel discussion on the space technology transfer themes.
The Head at JAXA for Strategic Planning and Industrial Promotion Takayuki Kawai highlighted systematically how Japanese space policy results in augmented JAXA support for innovation, technology transfer and entrepreneurship.
Marc Dvorscak from NASA outlined the emphasis which is taken in US towards entrepreneurship, industry and support to societal needs by making available portfolios of candidate technologies for new market creation, noting the property rights challenges and NASA’s supportive initiatives. He presented an impressive catalogue of hardware and software patents available for transfer to non-space sectors and to the corporate world.
Over 700 new start-ups have been fostered in Europe at the 20 ESA Business Incubation Centres in 16 European countries, all based on space spin-offs. He emphasised that space technology can provide smart solutions in almost every area here on Earth – even the Vatican uses space technology to help preserve its ancient document and book archives of inestimable worth for centuries to come.Sebastien Poujade from the French space agency CNES focused on the complementarities between large and small companies and highlighted the important role of technology transfer supportive tools like ActInspace that underline the global and partnership-enhancing nature of the sector.The ActInSpace challenge atttracts entrepreneurs, students and others to foster business ideas, based on using CNES and ESA space patents.
Students and officials, among others also representatives from OECD, Eurometropol and business incubators, had the opportunity to interact and pose questions in relation to the tolerance and criticality of failures and lessons learned for technology creation and dissemination, as well as the resources and failure tolerance of space agencies and industry.An informal lunch at ISU’s Pioneers Hall provided a venue for socializing and brain storming for speakers and audience alike. In the afternoon the SATTO members had their internal yearly meeting.
The SATTO working group includes a number of international and national space agencies and offices, including NASA from USA, ESA from Europe, CSA from Canada, CNES from France, DLR from Germany, ASI from Italy, JAXA from Japan, the Space Office from Switzerland, the Aerospace Research Institute from South Korea, the National Institute for Space Research from Brazil and ISA from Israel. Most of the members were present with also OECD representatives at this SATTO 2019 annual meeting 21 February 2019.
[Source: “SEVEN SPACE AGENCIES PRESENTED SPACE SPIN-OFF POTENTIALS” published by European Space Agency]Photo Credits: European Space Agency
