PH Space Agency is an excellent idea
Credit to Author: BEN KRITZ, TMT| Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2019 16:18:27 +0000
IT is one of those pieces of news that one desperately wishes would have gotten more attention than it has, even if it appears a little outlandish at first glance. In December, a bill that would create a Philippine Space Agency was overwhelmingly approved by the House of Representatives. A counterpart measure is now awaiting action by the Senate.
House Bill 8541, which was almost unanimously passed, will create a Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) under the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) “that will address all national issues and activities related to space science and technology applications.” The bill calls for the formulation of a national space use and development strategy, and earmarks 30 hectares of land within the Bases Conversion and Development Authority zone in Clark for the new agency’s headquarters.
In a press conference last week, DOST Secretary Fortunato de la Pena said his department had proposed a budget of P24 billion for the space agency’s first 10 years of operation. DOST has spent about P7.48 billion on space-related projects since 2010, de la Pena added. The most visible results of those efforts are the three microsatellites – called Diwata-1, Diwata-2, and Maya-1 – that have been developed and launched with the help of the Japanese.
Convincing the public of the necessity of having a space program is a tough sell for any government. The golden age of space exploration – the 1960s space race between the US and the Soviet Union – is most often portrayed now, at least from the American point of view, as a united national ambition, but in reality the US space program was dogged by public skepticism throughout the entire decade it took to land a man on the moon. Only once – immediately after the July 1969 Apollo 11 mission – did any public opinion poll show a majority of Americans supporting the vast expenditures for space exploration, and even then, only about 53 percent of those surveyed felt it was justified. For most of the space race, public support for the effort hovered around 40 percent, with a majority of people citing issues such as national defense, education, and anti-poverty programs as being more worthy of government funding.
That is an understandable reaction, and one that certainly will be expected from the public in this country as well. It seems more than a little dubious, in a country where 40 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day, the transportation and communications infrastructure is at least 10 years out of date, and people still die by the thousands of preventable diseases like measles and dengue fever, that funding space-faring aspirations is really the best use of the government budget. It is precisely because the Philippines is in the state it is, however, that makes the creation of PhilSA a worthy goal.
First, there are the practical applications of space technology. The Philippines’ three small satellites are used for high-resolution imagery, which in turn is useful for land use and climate monitoring, and mapping and navigation. If slightly more sophisticated satellites can be developed, weather monitoring and communications become possible. The Philippines needs these capabilities, and until now has done what every other country of similar economic and technical capacity does, which is to outsource most of the work. Developing a native program keeps at least some of the country’s talent and knowledge at home, saving money and gaining an even bigger dividend in competence that can be transferred to other parts of the economy.
Second, there is the business opportunity space technology presents for the Philippines. The era of monolithic, publicly funded space agencies that do everything from concept to launch has largely passed; instead, agencies like NASA, Roscosmos, and ESA now serve more often as facilitators for private enterprise efforts. Having even a modest technical, policy, and regulatory coordinating agency actually makes the Philippines an attractive investment destination for space technology companies, especially those in the launch vehicle business. The country has a pool of young technical talent, and is in a good location for space launches with Mindanao lying just a few degrees from the Equator.
Finally, there are the longer-term benefits of social and cultural change that pursuing space aspirations can provide. As a society, the Philippines is frankly not good at doing things on a national scale, and has until now shown no inclination to learn despite history being rife with examples of how a Big Effort can broadly benefit a society. America’s Apollo Program, for example, despite not being quite the public darling popular history makes it out to be, was the greatest engineering project in history, dwarfing the efforts put into such icons as the Great Pyramids or the Great Wall of China. Over a period of about 12 years, the coordinated focus on getting a man onto the Moon involved small and large industries in every state, and directly employed about 400,000 engineers. The US, and indeed the entire world 50 years later would not be what it is without the race to the Moon.
The competence the Philippines could gain from pursuing even a modest large-scale initiative – something on the order of India’s eventually successful effort to develop a home-grown satellite launch vehicle – is almost incalculable. The benefits will come not only in terms of technical know-how that could be applied to other industries, but in social and organizational terms as well – real-world experience in complex, cross-disciplinary management, in coordinating multiple industries and business sectors, and in aligning education with the country’s own knowledge requirements, rather than the job descriptions of overseas employers.
Launching PhilSA and making it a going concern shouldn’t necessarily take precedence over the day-to-day priorities of trying to keep people fed, housed, educated, and employed, but it should be given importance. It can, after all, help to focus those other efforts, and for what it’s worth, bragging rights as a legitimate space-faring nation are not at all a bad thing, either, and something only a few other countries can claim.
Email: ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
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