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TOKYO — Singapore’s new space agency signed a cooperation agreement with its Japanese counterpart as part of its efforts to build up the country’s space industry.
During the Spacetide conference here July 6, Ngiam Le Na, chief executive of the National Space Agency of Singapore (NSAS), signed a memorandum of cooperation with Hiroshi Yamakawa, president of the Japanese space agency JAXA.
Under the agreement, the two agencies will examine potential opportunities for cooperation in areas spanning space technology, science, applications and industry development. The agencies will also work to promote collaboration between Japanese and Singaporean space companies.
Industrial collaboration will be a key aspect of the agreement. “We are putting a lot of focus on satellites and satellite-related technology,” Jonathan Hung, deputy chief executive of NSAS, told reporters after the signing ceremony. That includes gaining insights from Japan on how to build a satellite industry ecosystem and finding potential partnerships with Japan.
Singapore’s space industry includes about 70 companies and 2,000 people, Ngiam said. “We hope to be able to grow it a bit more in the next few years.”
The agreement is the first since Singapore’s government established NSAS on April 1. The agency has five main functions: develop and operate national space capabilities, support research and development, mature the nation’s space industry, advance international partnerships and enact national space legislation.
Those national space capabilities, Ngiam said later, include developing satellites as well as Earth observation and space situational awareness systems. “This is looking at, for example, Earth sustainability, climate resilience, food resilience, maritime security and so on,” she said.
The national space legislation, she said, would come later, in the next three to five years. “We intend to enact space legislation within Singapore to ensure that it’s both pro-business as well as to give us a safe and sustainable space environment.”
During a conference panel, Ngiam said the agency would be selective in the parts of the space sector it will pursue. “We do not have capabilities across the entire value chain,” she said. “Singapore is very small, so we do not have space for launch.”
“Singapore is very good at choosing what we need to own, what we need to acquire and what we need to build,” she added.
When setting up the agency, she said the government was considering key performance indicators like jobs created and value added to the country’s economy. “But space is no longer just a sector on its own. It is an enabling infrastructure for many sectors across the entire economy,” she said. “That is very difficult to measure.”
In a separate interview, Chune Yang Lum, co-founder and chief executive of SpeQtral, a Singapore-based startup working on quantum key distribution technologies using satellites, said his company has benefitted from support from the government before the agency was established earlier this year.
He said bilateral agreements like the one NSAS signed with JAXA will help. “It paves the way for companies to engage with us,” he said. “More of these will help at the national level.”
“By also drawing attention to the Singapore space ecosystem, some of the partnerships we have help catalyze momentum for the growth of the industry in Singapore,” he added.
Ngiam said Singapore has several bilateral space agreements that predate the founding of NSAS with countries such as India, Thailand and the UAE. “We hope to expand on that list going forward.”