On the 10th of April at the National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute” a round table discussion “Space activities of Ukraine in the near future: priorities, scenarios, challenges” was held. Its organizers were the Ukrainian Association of high-tech enterprises and organizations “Cosmos”, the Space Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the Space Research Institute Space Research Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and State Space Agency of Ukraine and, of course, the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.
This is one of the first public events of the “Cosmos” Association, which united more than 40 industrial enterprises and scientific organizations working in the space and tangent areas both state and private ownership. It was devoted to discussion of conceptual approaches to the development of the space strategy of Ukraine. Participants of the round table - including representatives of industry, science, higher education and public administration - expressed their vision of the future of space activities in Ukraine and the approaches to determining the priorities of its development. This, in particular, was spoken by the First Vice-President of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, a well-known Ukrainian scientist and statesman Volodymyr Horbulin, who emphasized that the strategy should become not only a document that will determine the future fate of space activity in our country, but also will help Ukraine to enter the international space community. In addition, he noted that it is fundamentally important to develop not only one, but several variants of the draft strategy, in order to summarize them later and reach the final and optimal variant of it.
“If we conduct brainstorming on Ukraine's place in world cooperation in the field of space exploration, first of all, we should see and then display in our strategy the current state of ours; understand where we are invited; where we can collaborate with someone on an affiliate basis. From this we can push ourselves, design all this for the capabilities of Ukraine and build on this whole strategy. Another important principle of its construction is the consolidation of our resources - both human and financial, and so on. Now they are limited in us and they are not enough for a wide spectrum of space investigations. However, we must focus what we have on the top-priority directions that are important for needs of Ukraine. Obviously, we can formulate a whole series of principles. I hope this round table will be the beginning of systematic work for this purpose“, - said the rector of the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Michael Zgurovsky.
Therefore, the strategy should be the basis for drafting program documents in the field of space activities. Its main purpose is to provide expert analysis of existing and future directions of Ukraine's space activities and recommendations on the priority of future events. So the document will contain an overview of the current state, justification of the most perspective directions for Ukraine and consideration of possible scenarios. In discussing the issues of its development took part specialists of various structures, whose work is related to space projects. Thus, their speeches were devoted to various aspects of the development of the Ukrainian space industry, which may be reflected in the future strategy. In order to develop a consolidated position on the raised issues, the organizers distributed the questionnaire to the participants to reflect their views on the vision of the priorities and prospects of space activities while developing a project of the document.
The next meeting of the Ukrainian association of high-tech enterprises and organizations “Cosmos”, as well as others involved in the development of space technology and research organizations, is scheduled to take place next month in the Dnipro.