National Space Day is a day to celebrate humanity’s forays into the unknown, how far science has come, and the wonders that lie just beyond our atmosphere. Why do we celebrate space? Why do we celebrate our final frontier? To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, or to boldly go where no one has gone before? Space is closer to us than we think and in the last years has been a formidable means of economic growth and business opportunities. But there’s even more.
Space is the cradle of amazing technologies and innovations that are becoming more and more available and ‘adaptable’ to different needs. We should celebrate and acknowledge space as a platform to design, develop and test solutions such as earth observation images, life support systems, monitoring and telemetry, safety and security, energy optimization, and future food.
Space and UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are the perfect matches for the “Space solutions searching for Earth problems to tackle” metaphor. If we look at SDG6 (water) and its correlated goals (see A Nexus Approach for the SDGs), we can find a lot of space technologies and space-derived solutions to detect water leaks, filter water, find reservoirs, protect coastal areas, monitor inland waterways, and exploit precision farming, for example.
The 2022 Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Riyadh hosted two sessions related to this, featuring panelists and GEN Space board members showcasing solutions and examples of exciting opportunities emerging on both sides of the Kármán Line. Panelists discussed and addressed audience questions on how space is not just cool because of its beauty but because of what you can do with it.
“It was exciting and energizing to see how much interest was generated by our panels as well as with the meetings we had with entrepreneurial ecosystem stakeholders around the globe,” said Stephan Reckie, executive director of GEN Space. “We all had a lot of fun and made great new connections related to opportunities for space entrepreneurship.”
The connections between space and SDGs create opportunities to boost entrepreneurship, develop local solutions for global problems and boost the economy. Through the Global Entrepreneurship Network, GEN Space is supporting the growth of space entrepreneurship ecosystems around the world and the startups within them that are developing solutions for SDGs using space technologies or data.
Why do we celebrate Space this year? Because we must celebrate our final frontier, we must celebrate the innovations derived from Space technology and data, we must take care of the only mothership of the Starfleet: we call it Earth.