France-Singapore space cooperation CNES at annual meetings and GSTC

At the opening session of GSTC, Jean-Yves Le Gall spoke on the theme of Space Agencies’ Role in Fostering Regional Collaboration, underlining the fundamental importance of international space cooperation illustrated by the successes that Europe has achieved through the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Commission, in particular the Ariane, Rosetta-Philae, Galileo and Copernicus programmes. He detailed the key role that nations are playing around the world, nurturing the development of NewSpace and supporting start-ups, citing CNES’s efforts geared towards ‘inventing the future of space’.

Jean-Yves Le Gall then paid tribute to the dynamism of South-East Asian nations with which CNES has collaborated in space on numerous occasions over more than 30 years, confirming the agency’s pivotal role on the international space scene. He pointed to the many joint missions and space applications projects across the region and encouraged all concerned to pursue the efforts already accomplished in Earth observation (with SPOT and Pleiades), search and rescue (with Cospas-Sarsat) and telecommunications satellites operations and launches from the Guiana Space Centre, one of CNES’s four centres of excellence.

Jean-Yves Le Gall also took time to meet Singapore’s space officials, following up the agreement signed in Paris in 2015 on the occasion of Singapore President Tony Tan’s state visit to France. In the presence of Marc Abensour, France’s Ambassador to Singapore, he held talks with Beh Swan Gin, Chairman of the Economic Development Board (EDB), Gim Pew Quek, Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Defence, and Vincent Chong, CEO of ST Engineering. CNES has a cooperation agreement with EDB, the government agency whose role is to encourage and federate industrial initiatives in Singapore, through its Office for Space Technology and Industry (OSTIn) in the field of space affairs.

After his visit, Jean-Yves Le Gall commented: “Singapore has big ambitions in space and I wanted through my presence here at GSTC to consolidate our cooperative ties at a time when the sector is seeing major shifts. In this respect, our strong ties with EDB, with the Singapore Space and Technology Association (SSTA) and with Nanyang Technology University (NTU) offer the perfect institutional framework to nurture industrial initiatives, especially in the field of innovation where Singapore excels.”

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Contacts
Pascale Bresson    Tel. +33 (0)1 44 76 75 39    pascale.bresson@cnes.fr
Fabienne Lissak    Tel. +33 (0)1 44 76 78 37    fabienne.lissak@cnes.fr

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