The first Spanish Space Agency has been running for just six months and Miguel Belló (Puertollano, 1961) is its first director. Also a commissioner of PERTE aerospace, the positions and plans are piling up, and looking at his office in Madrid, a space with just one office, an open-plan meeting room and another administration room, everything seems to be done. “We were at the Ministry, but it is packed. We call this the little floor and here is fundamentally the PERTE. In Seville we already have the Agency, where I go every week,” he explains. The plans advance at the pace of AVE. And he is all passion. “Our life would be miserable without exploiting space,” he says.
Is launching the Spanish Space Agency a dream come true?
The truth is that it was missing. In months we are in things that we were not in before. It was the G20, but a month before it was the G20 of space and Spain had never been there as it did not have a space agency. This year we have been, and being in Bangalore, India, it has been very good to talk to their space agency and see what we can collaborate on, now that it is fashionable.
After six months, was and is the goal to have a Spanish version of NASA?
In the older agencies, the industry was not developed and they made satellites or missions. Modern agencies are management agencies and that is why we are not going to have the thousands of people that the French CNES has, for example. We have designed a staff of 80 to manage, define strategies, promote laws. The industry is there to manufacture satellites.
If Spain is in the European Space Agency (ESA), why found one of its own?
There are many more things than the ESA. The EU has its space agency, the EUSPA, with its own decision-making committees and now the Agency will centralize our position. And, apart from that, there are many more actors: we have signed an agreement directly with NASA, we have signed a bilateral agreement with Mexico, and we are also starting with Argentina. And then there is also the whole space security and defense part, which is not within ESA, which is a civil project. In the US, for example, NASA's budget is around 20,000 million and the Secretary of Defense has one of 30,000 for space.
Everything is to be done. What is essential?
Each of us deals with 200 satellites every day and our life would be miserable without space: without weather forecasts, without tuning the navigator, without news and photos that usually arrive by satellite. The Agency wants to ensure that the Spanish citizen has these services and is going to open a new program so that broadband communication reaches the rural areas of Spain just like a city and at the same price. Furthermore, we are going to do space science and industry and that translates into high-quality jobs and wealth generation. Then there are more things on a second level when seeing how India sends a mission to the Moon and all of India feels proud of that technological capacity.
Will Spain reach the Moon?
It is possible, it is a matter of making the decision. Right now Spain has the technology to be able to afford it.
And why doesn't it arrive?
Because there are priorities. We have limited budgets, priorities are generated and now we have given them to Earth observation, climate change and natural disasters. There is probably a scientific interest among Spanish physicists in the Moon, but it is not to go for the sake of going, which is free, but because we will have a scientific return or in another way. And when that is a priority, we can do it perfectly. We have already manufactured the structure of the probe that descended to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Spain has already been to Saturn.
In space everything seems like a geopolitical game between powers...
And Europe has no way to put a man in space. Only the US, Russia and China can. India soon. Europe is being the last and for the first time in many decades it does not have launchers to launch satellites. In theory Ariane 6 had to be there now, but the pandemic, inflation, etc., have delayed it and we have a hole of a year. How did we mitigate it before? With the Russian Soyuz. But with the war in Ukraine we can't. We are organizing a large space summit in Seville where one of the topics to be discussed will be this capacity.
Does Spain want to be the protagonist here?
In the space industry we have 5,000 people in Spain, but we need more. It's a bottleneck. There are Spanish companies that have hundreds of open vacancies that they cannot fill and the consequence is that we do not grow at the rate we could grow and we lose. Right now, with the aerospace PERTE, we are investing. There are great opportunities, and if we want to play a role, we need more people from engineering, physicists, mathematicians or lawyers, because the space is becoming more and more legal.
Does Spain want to be in the world of space what it is for the automotive world, the factory, and then it will export?
The space industry is going to be more similar to the automobile industry than it used to be, but it is changing, and that is why we want Spain to be able to develop serial satellites, which is a paradigm shift. Until recently, a man tightened a screw and it took three years to make the satellites. Not now. Now Starlink has thousands of satellites and the projects that Spain has underway, Indra and Enaire with Startical, for example, have three hundred or so satellites and we have to make two or three a week.
The Agency has projects for drones, satellites, electric and hydrogen aircraft... Of all the projects, which are many, which is the most groundbreaking?
There are three. One is the Atlantic constellation that we are going to create with Portugal and to which Greece now wants to join, because obtaining an image every three days, a week, like now, is not worth it, and a satellite image every few minutes is, even if it is not as high quality. It will have a unique revisit frequency. Another is to develop a system to distribute quantum security keys: quantum computers are coming, traditional keys are not going to stand up to their attack, and for the security of banking transactions and more, this would be a world first. The third is a microlauncher. SpaceX is a monster that launches tons, but launchers are needed for small things when what is sent to space is getting smaller and smaller.
The aerospace PERTE tries to mobilize some 4.5 billion euros in private and public collaboration. The deadline is 2025 because, if not, European funds are in danger. How much progress has been made?
80-90% have already been put out to tender and contracting and we are over 60% in execution. We're doing reasonably well.
Has the easy thing been done and now comes the complicated part?
There are some projects that are starting, such as the rocket launcher, whose contract was recently signed. We have a limited amount of time but, for now, we are optimistic and believe that we will achieve it.
Space belongs to no one, but it seems that it is being privatized given the number of private projects in it: Elon Musk's Starlink satellites alone are thousands. We have a problem?
We have managed to have sustainability problems on Earth and in space. You have to regulate. We need to manage space traffic. In the Spanish presidency of the Council of the European Union we promote the creation of rules because right now we have 30,000 controlled objects larger than five centimeters, but smaller ones are believed to be one million, and, according to a NASA professor, if each collision generates 2,000 fragments, if this continues in a couple of decades or three many more collisions and fragments will be generated and a chain reaction will begin – cascade collision, it is called –, by which we will no longer be able to use the space. It can happen if no action is taken.
Is there demand for everything you want to produce? Or is it a boom? Because companies keep adding to the sector: SpaceX, Boeing, Axiom...
20 years ago 10 satellites were launched a year and last year 2,000 were launched. The growth is exponential. There are many companies that invest, many investment funds and capital, and it all adds up. The market for telecommunications, earth observation and satellite navigation are consolidated. But there is more: space tourism right now is limited to super luxury, but it is going to be democratized; and in steroid mining there is a great projection when we have a shortage of resources on the planet in rare earths, fundamental metals, etc., and the asteroids are full.
Isn't combining the public interest in decongesting space and the private interest in getting economic returns from it, as NASA and ESA defend, something contradictory?
You have to manage to combine the two things, but with certain rules. For example, a very basic rule must be achieved that when a mission meets an objective, it is buried. What happen? That this maneuver costs money because you have to use fuel and with that fuel you can continue operating for one or two years. It costs many millions to be an environmentalist in space. And if Spanish companies do it, and European companies do it, but not those from other continents...
