Space industry specialists have made the trip from all over Europe and beyond to attend the third edition of the Space Forum, a two-day event held in Luxembourg on May 21 and 22, aimed at promoting exchanges and triggering debates between all the active forces of the sector. Three main topics were addressed during the first day of the event: Security, Open Access to Space, and Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

GovSatCom for Defence and Security applications

After having offered his welcome words to the participants, Paul Wells, Vice President & Chief Commercial Officer of GovSat, presented the activities of his organization, a public-private venture owned by SES and the Luxembourg State. "In a harsh threat environment, our EU and NATO partners are exposed to increasing signal jamming, cyber-attacks and physical attacks", he said. "Our mission is to support our users in need of secure long range communications." To achieve this objective, GovSat provides their partners with X-band mission beam capacity, terminal supply, integration and installation, and local maintenance and support. And all this is orchestrated from Luxembourg, "a senior provider in terms of satellite operations".

Benoît Deper, Founder of Aerospacelab, then took the floor to give an overview of his company's services. "We develop tools to automate a broad range of tasks from surveying to monitoring. We process heterogeneous datasets composed from various sources and can also customize the tools to incorporate your own proprietary datasets", he said. "Another facet of our business consists in building versatile small satellites in the range of 25 to 50 kg. Our satellites are equipped with a variety of sensors collecting high resolution optical data multiple times per day on selected target areas", he added. Benoît Deper concluded by saying that satellites had to shrink in size and in cost to allow constellation to happen, but not too much otherwise their optical performances would be too limited.

"Space has become the new playground for hackers", stated José Achache, who represented AP-Swiss, the ambassador platform of the European Space Agency’s ARTES applications programmes in Switzerland. According to him, applications require enhanced security on ground and space infrastructures, which includes existing markets – such as Satcom, GNSS and Earth observation - as well as upcoming markets – like cloud services and IoT. José Achache introduced a selection of solutions developed by companies from the AP-Swiss ecosystem for ensuring fully secure IoT services from space: Arcaspace's hardware security module for small satellites, Astrocast's global IoT connectivity solution, and Geosatis's secure geo-localized connected devices and systems.

The first roundtable session of the day gathered Hermann Ludwig Moeller, Head of Institutional and European Programmes at ESA, Carine Claeys, Head of the Space Task Force of the European External Action Service, Tanja Zegers, Responsible for the European Commission's GovSatCom initiative and was moderated by Christine Leurquin, VP Institutional Relations of SES.