Application Support

More and more are the policy makers and the citizens concerned about the return of investment and useful applications of Space R&D for everyday life.

Good news: the number of opportunities as never been so large as presently to spin off Space to Earth for the benefit of the citizen! These benefits concern numerous domains: the positioning and navigation by GNSS for our car or other assets, the coming of the 5G that should smoothly inter-wave space and terrestrial telecoms, the monitoring of our crops or the climate change, the new means of safety and rescue, improved protection and resilience of our terrestrial infrastructures, improved management of our air/water/energy/material/assets resources, for sustainable waste recycling and new hygienic/sanitation methods, health monitoring or remote medicine, development and test of new (bio)materials, food safety and new production methods, for more efficient and ecological transportation…

Our imagination is maybe the limit, not the sky!
The use of space infrastructure and data is an enabler for many applications on Earth and is a strong driver for economical growth.

To support Space to Earth applications, Belgium is using some specific ESA programs to which it participates, namely

BASS (Bussiness Application and Space Solutions), offering advice and Space-to-Earth application cofounding opportunities, business incubations - BICs- and technology transfer broker network.
More details on the BASS component of the ESA\ARTES programme...

Future EO: EO4society seeks to provide a better understanding of the complexity of the Earth system and the impacts of climate change, which is essential for international efforts and decision-makers to address challenging environmental issues.
More information about Future EO...

NAVISP supports European industry initiatives in the highly competitive and rapidly evolving global market for Satellite Navigation, and more broadly PNT technologies and services, while supporting participating States in enhancing their national objectives and capabilities in the sector in coordination with the EU.
More information...

INCUBED:‘Investing in Industrial Innovation’  is an Public Private Partnership co-funding programme run by the ESA Φ-lab.  InCubed focuses on developing innovative and commercially viable products and services that exploit the value of Earth Observation imagery and datasets.
More information...

ESA has also designed a new framework for the space to earth applications, the so-called the ESA Downstream Gateway , in order to promote those applications. The purpose of the Downstream Gateway is to create links between business sectors and ESA’s capacities in terms of infrastructures and activities, to interact with industry and potential partners, listening to their needs and providing easy access to ESA’s expertise, programmes and activities in applications and technical domains.

Additionally, space and its terrestrial applications are definitively a crucial tool to achieve the United Nations 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
More information on the contribution of EU to this objectives .

The new EU Space Programme   and Horizon Europe programme have certainly been aligned with these Sustainable Development Goals and will encourage Earth applications of the present and future European Space Infrastructures (Galileo, Copernicus, EU Govsatcom, SSA).