On 1 November, the United Nations General Assembly First Committee approved a resolution on norms of responsible behaviours in space that proposes the establishment of an Open Ended Working Group - which can be valued as a promising step forward to preserve stability in space.

The European Space Policy Institute (ESPI) is looking to employ a Research Intern for a duration of 6 months at the premises of the Institute in Vienna, starting from January 2022, to support several projects related to ESPI space sector watch.

The European Space Policy Institute is pleased to welcome the UK Space Agency, OHB SE and SERI / Swiss Space Office to the Institute’s membership. Each of these organisations joined ESPI in 2021. ESPI’s membership now consists of its two founding members, ESA and FFG, and 14 regular members.

A lot happened in the space sector throughout October. The ESA Council appointed three new directors while, in parallel, ESA DG Josef Aschbacher proposed three new accelerators to tackle societal, economic & security challenges, and France adopted its “France 2030” investment plan in which it commits approx. €1.5 billion to space. You can read about all of these developments and more in the latest edition of ESPI Insights.

EPO, ESA and ESPI have initiated a collaboration through a series of space-themed “Patent insight reports”. These publicly available studies analyse global patent filing data to identify major trends and developments in specific sub-domains of the space sector. The second study resulting from this partnership titled “Quantum technologies and space” has just been published.