Toulouse Space Centre receives visit of Anne Sulling, Estonia’s Minister of Foreign Trade and Entrepreneurship

Tuesday 3 February, CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall and Marc Pircher, Director of the Toulouse Space Centre, received Anne Sulling, Estonia’s Minister of Foreign Trade and Entrepreneurship. Her official visit came as Estonia is set to become the 21st Member State of the European Space Agency (ESA) on Wednesday 4 February.

Anne Sulling, Estonia’s Minister of Foreign Trade and Entrepreneurship, will sign the agreement on Estonia’s accession to the ESA Convention on Wednesday 4 February, making it a full Member State of the agency. Until now a European Cooperating State, Estonia will thus translate its space ambitions as it prepares to increase the budget allocated to its space programme and following the decisions last year to channel new funding into national R&D and to contribute to Eumetsat. Estonia also has excellent research centres, notably in astronomy and astrophysics at its Tartu Observatory and the Universities of Tartu and Tallinn.

Ahead of its accession, the minister and a delegation of representatives from Estonia’s institutions and industry visited CNES’s field centre in Toulouse on Tuesday 3 February, where she listened to a presentation on France’s space expertise, France being ESA’s leading contributor and therefore a future key partner for Estonia. After an overview of the centre’s facilities from Marc Pircher, Anne Sulling was accompanied by Jean-Yves Le Gall on a tour of the French Instruments Mars Operations Centre (FIMOC), the Science Operations and Navigation Centre (SONC) that guided Philae to its landing on comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and the ATV Control Centre (ATV-CC).

After the visit, Jean-Yves Le Gall commented: “It is a great honour for CNES to welcome the delegation headed by Anne Sulling, Estonia’s Minister of Foreign Trade and Entrepreneurship, here today in Toulouse. After four years as a European Cooperating State, Estonia’s ambitions as a spacefaring nation are finally about to be fulfilled through its newly acquired status as a full Member State of ESA. As history continues to teach us, it is our will to move forward together and push back boundaries and divisions that will keep Europe and its space sector united and strong. The arrival of a new ESA Member State is always a very important event. And it is by pulling together within a strong spacefaring Europe that we will meet the challenges ahead, which is why we are extremely happy today to formally welcome Estonia into the circle of ESA nations.”