Sánchez announces that the Spanish Space Agency will also have its headquarters outside Madrid

The Government continues the decentralization process of new State institutions and entities outside of Madrid.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
09 June 2022 Thursday 06:55
18 Reads
Sánchez announces that the Spanish Space Agency will also have its headquarters outside Madrid

The Government continues the decentralization process of new State institutions and entities outside of Madrid. If last Tuesday the Minister of Territorial Policy, Isabel Rodríguez, announced that the future Global Observatory of Spanish, dependent on the Cervantes Institute, will have its headquarters in La Rioja, this Thursday it was the head of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez, who announced that the future Spanish Space Agency will also be installed outside the state capital.

Sources from the Ministry of Territorial Policy explain to La Vanguardia that the location of the future body that will coordinate all space activities in Spain and in international programs has not yet been decided. First, the Science Law prepared by Minister Diana Morant must be approved, where the creation of the aforementioned Space Agency will be collected. And, as it is a newly created body, the determination of its headquarters will be governed by the "competitive competition" procedure established by the decree law that the Council of Ministers approved last March.

During the visit that Pedro Sánchez made today to the Training and Visitors Center that the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA-NASA) has in the Madrid town of Robledo de Chavela, to present the strategic project for the aerospace sector in Spain, the The head of the Executive has announced that the Council of Ministers next Tuesday will approve the creation of the Space Council, a high-level interministerial group that will have the task of accelerating the work so that the Spanish Space Agency is operational at the beginning of the year 2023.

This Space Agency, according to Sánchez, will also contribute to “strengthening territorial and social cohesion”. "According to this process of deconcentration of new bodies of the general administration of the State, and the selection criteria that are set, the Agency will be located outside the capital of Spain", he assured. “We want to share the State, we want to deconcentrate the State and that from the public administration we can also create those opportunities and that territorial cohesion in our country”, pointed out the Chief Executive.

Thanks to the European recovery funds, Sánchez explained that the new strategic aerospace project in Spain will mobilize more than 4,500 million euros, until the year 2025, with a contribution from the public sector of 2,193 million and a private investment of 2,340 million.

The news has been known in the middle of the weekly plenary session of the Madrid regional Chamber although, at that time, there was not a single member of the Executive in the hemicycle. Neither the regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso -who has published a tweet on her social networks-, nor the Minister of Science, Enrique Ossorio, nor the Minister of Economy, Javier Fernández-Lasquetty.

That is why the general secretary of the PP in Madrid, Alfonso Serrano, has improvised an appearance in the corridors of the Chamber to charge harshly against Pedro Sánchez.

Serrano has described as "unheard of" that the president "of all Spaniards" go to one of the municipalities of the Community, Robledo de Chavela, "without the slightest respect or institutional decorum to notify the Presidency of the Autonomous Government", to "spit in the faces of the people of Madrid", "insult and despise them".

Serrano has focused on the high technical quality of the two Madrid projects proposed by the municipalities of Robledo de Chavela and Tres Cantos. "He does not know where the Agency is going to go, but he does know that he is not going to come to Madrid. This decision is going to be made with fairness and transparency when he has not known the projects. He is saying that this Space Agency is not going to go to the best possible place with the best possible technological project, but rather it will go to the one that Sánchez is politically interested in disguised as a commission of experts", he lamented.

"We feel deeply insulted. The President of the Government of Spain is the President of all Spaniards and, therefore, he should also be the President of Madrid. We Madrilenians do not feel it as our own since he does nothing but insult and despise the people of Madrid ", he declared, to immediately denounce that they want to raise taxes, that they call them unsupportive and that, at the same time, they not only want to "relocate institutions but also work so that new investments come to Madrid".

For the 'popular', "it is as if they gave up Madrid", what they do not know is whether in economic terms or in political terms. Serrano believes that what is clear is that if "Sánchez continues to attack, insult and despise the people of Madrid" he is convinced that next year "the PSOE will not win a single seat in Madrid."