In an exclusive interview with Geospatial World, Colonel Marcin Mazur, Vice President, Polish Space Agency speaks about Poland’s future launches and learnings from Russia Ukraine conflict, and much more.
How is Poland building its Earth Observation capabilities and what kind of impacts are you planning to make in the European EO sector?
We are trying to build different types of capabilities both from the civilian side, the Polish Space Agency as well as the Ministry of Defense (MOD) side. We are building a constellation of microsatellites for civilian use, which will be the source of data for defence users as well as an additional source of data for military customers.
Last year our government decided to increase our subscription to the European Space Agency four times, which is a huge upgrade compared to previous years. We became a six or seven nation with the amount of money subscribed to ESA. We want to have them involved in projects, and programs, and to be involved with other nations or other companies that have competencies.
Additionally, we are open to other options internally in Poland to provide services, and products, which can help, for instance, the administration to do their job quickly.
One example is National Satellite Information Systems, the platform which provides services and products for administration based on Copernicus data, but also on commercial at this moment. In future, the system will be populated by data coming from the EO constellation.
With the Ukraine and Russia conflict in view, what is the POLSA’s plan for the launch of defence satellites? Are you developing any defence capabilities to prevent situations like Ukraine from occurring?
Of course, the war in Ukraine showed us that resilience is crucial, that you can have different types of challenges, and risks, which you are not able to predict or you didn’t believe that it could be a risk including cyberattacks or electronic welfare.
Developing space resilience, and resilient space architecture, the whole process is important, not only the capabilities, the satellites, or the platforms on the orbits.
It’s the whole system from designing or from when you start thinking about your needs when you identify your customers and you start building the whole process, the capabilities when you decide to procure or to build on your own.
This is where the whole issue of resilience starts. On the other hand, there is little difference between military, governmental and civilian capabilities.
So commercial space capabilities are extremely important nowadays. They provide different types of additional sources for government, for defence, and for the military. So that’s the actions which we are paying attention to within the operations.
The procurement of Earth observation satellites, which MOD signed two years ago is purely a military contract. I’m not in a position to share the information about it.
However, the constellation of two extremely high-resolution satellites provided by an external contractor, the French one and the MOD will be responsible for the exploitation of necessary information.
What kind of a market are you targeting and what kind of cooperation are you expecting?
This year we are celebrating our 10th anniversary. So the Polish space sector with Polish entities, the public and the private ones is growing. We are open to different types of corporations, typically B2B and those more covered by our agencies, and national agencies to help the entities connect.
We are open to a really wide area of partnerships because the space is very wild. From one side we have companies that can find counterparts or business partners in India for downstream applications. On the other side, the upstream, the satellite providers, and developers looking for options to be subcontractors, to be some subsystem supporters for national needs for bigger projects in both directions.
So what are the major space activities that POLSA is targeting or planning to work on in the next 2-3 years?
We, as a national agency, our main role is to support the space sector, the private and the public growth, so we involve them in different projects.
The one which is one of our main priorities is the constellation of Earth observation microsatellites. We are also looking for options for GOVSATCOM capability development in the Polish market. We have a company which can provide a transponder for international bus providers for instance.
We are growing with the space situational awareness (SSA) environment. As an agency, we are a member European Union Space Strategy for Security and Defence (EUSSSD) partnership, as well as a quite strong member of this community since we are providing data from 17 different sensors located around the globe on different continents. So that’s our priorities.
Also in the first half of next year, we are sending our second Polish personnel to the International Space Station and that will also be a challenge and a test for our entities to do some R&D projects and to gather some new knowledge about space and the environment over us, which is also the option for partnerships and collaboration. I started my career with geospatial, soon I became an imagery intelligence officer.
The GeoInt nowadays is much wider than it used to be. It is not only the data, the vectors, rosters and provision of the data to customers, but it’s the whole architecture of different products and services and the MOD or military customers who require different platforms, vehicles and systems provision of approved data and information, which is part of the whole geo ecosystem. With so many advanced technologies available today like AI/ML and edge computing etc.
The new technology helps us to do things quicker, for instance, AI just gives you the chance to have all the big data, extracted from 20 years ago, when there was a lack of sources. Nowadays space is pretty cheap and available for most nations around the world, but we lack technicians and analysts for data exploitation.
AI gives chances to exploit the big bunch of data to receive the information we are looking for the differences between different images, between different sources and so on.
