Middle East Space Roundup: 30 January-4 February 2023
A summary of all the space news in the Greater Middle East over the past week
Image courtesy of Yahsat.
The following are the major space developments in the Greater Middle East region tracked by Middle East Space Monitor over the past week:
30 January 2023
YahClick, a subsidiary of the UAE’s commercial satellite communications company Yahsat, announced a six-year $15 million deal with Sudan’s Canar Telecommunications to provide satellite broadband internet services in Sudan and to enable Canar to support the Sudanese government’s efforts to digitally transform the national economy.
31 January 2023
The Franco-Emirati Business Council held its second annual meeting in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and was attended by the French finance minister Bruno Le Maire. The council aims to strengthen commercial activity between France and the UAE across a range of industries and economic sectors, to include greater commercial space collaboration.
In Israel the annual Ilan Ramon International Space Conference kicked off with a keynote speech by Israeli President Isaac Herzog who called for greater international cooperation in space exploration. Among the official delegations attending the annual conference named in honour of Israel’s first astronaut Ilan Ramon, who was killed along with his fellow-crew members in the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster, were the UAE and Morocco.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog speaking at the annual Ilan Ramon International Space Conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. Photograph courtesy of GPO Ronen Horesh.
1 February 2023
Azerbaijan and Hungary elevated their relations to a strategic partnership during a state visit to Budapest by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. President Aliyev and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban witnessed the signing of six cooperative agreements across a range of sectors to include space cooperation.
At the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the third session of the Open-Ended Working Group on Reducing Space Threats through Norms, Rules, and Principles of Responsible Behaviors took place with participation, along with many other countries, from the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Syria, and Türkiye. Among the ritual hypocritical bluster of some states was the statement made by Iran that condemned, among other things, the military uses of space while maintaining silence on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Space Command and its space launch and satellite activities. Iran also stated that norms in space are essentially a political plot to restrict space activities carried out by Tehran. The Syrian delegation supported Chinese and Russian efforts to establish a legally binding treaty banning weapons in space - a matter of dispute as China and Russia do not include weapons launched from Earth into space (weapons that these two states have routinely tested in recent years) as part of their proposed treaty. The delegation from Türkiye expressed its support of the moratorium on the testing of destructive weapons in space led by the United States, although rumours of Turkish interest in space weapons persist (see below), and made some constructive proposals for norms. Lastly, the delegation from the UAE expressed its support for the development of norms of behaviour in space, with Omran Sharif, the UAE Assistant Minister for Advanced Sciences and Technology Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, stating, “The UAE does not consider space activities as a race. We look at it as an area that enables international cooperation, builds capabilities, and serves humankind. We highly appreciate international efforts in reducing space threats, and we expect these efforts to bridge the regulatory gap caused by advancements in space technologies and systems.”
Saudi Arabia’s first astronauts since Prince Sultan bin Salman Al Saud in 1985 may be launched to the International Space Station in May 2023. Saudi Arabia signed a contract with U.S. company Axiom Space in September 2022 to train Saudi astronauts and training for the AX-2 mission is currently underway, with the mission commander, Peggy Whitson, and pilot, John Shoffner, have already been named but the two other astronauts remain unnamed as per the wishes of the customer, leading to speculation that they are the Saudi astronauts who apparently started training in November 2022.
A trade mission from Ireland visited the UAE, led by Dara Calleary, Irish Minister of State for Trade Promotion and Digital Transformation. The Irish delegation was hosted by the UAE’s Minister of Economy, Abdullah bin Touq Al Marri, who said, "We are keen to bolster joint mechanisms to increase trade exchanges with Ireland, stimulate mutual investment flows and diversify them to include areas of the new economy, including AI, space industry, FinTech, and entrepreneurship, among others…”
2 February 2023
Lebanese online publication Tactical Report says that the Royal Saudi Air and Space Force, created in 2022, has a budget of $2 billion to develop, among other things, early warning and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) strategic capabilities - presumably a mix of air and space platforms. The Saudi Ministry of Defence is reportedly going to great lengths to keep the development of these capabilities classified.
Photograph of SpaceIL’s Beresheet-2 lunar lander. Photograph courtesy of Amir Shemesh.
The Israel Space Agency and non-profit organisation SpaceIL signed a cooperation agreement with the U.S. space agency NASA on the sidelines of the annual Ilan Ramon International Space Conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. SpaceIL, with support of the Israel Space Agency, is building the Beresheet-2 lunar lander that is scheduled to launch for the moon in 2025. Under the cooperative agreement, NASA will contribute a Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer to the lander, communication network support, coordination with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and participation in the selection of the Beresheet-2’s landing site on the moon and the mission’s science team.
3 February 2023
An official from the UAE’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai provided some details about space cooperation between the Arab Gulf state and South Korea. Amer Mohammed Al Sayegh, director of Space Systems Development at MBRSC, said in a media interview that the UAE and South Korea have a long history of space cooperation and that future initiatives could include a South Korean payload contributed to MBRSC’s Rashid-2 lunar rover that will be sent to the moon on board China’s Chang’e-7 lunar lander in 2026, and the eventual Emirati use of South Korean space launch vehicles that are currently under development.
The UAE’s MBRSC also announced details of Sultan Al Neyadi’s long-duration mission on board the International Space Station that is scheduled to start on 26 February 2023. Al Neyadi, the UAE’s second astronaut, will spend approximately 4,000 hours on board the ISS and will carry out at least 19 scientific experiments and participate in numerous tele-education events with schools in the UAE and around the world.
A curious story published in Tactical Report alleges that Turkish aerospace company Roketsan is developing a co-orbital antisatellite (ASAT) weapon and that the UAE has informally expressed some interest in it. According to the story Major General Dr. Mubarak Saeed Ghafan Al Jabri, the Assistant Undersecretary for Support and Defence Industries at the UAE Ministry of Defence met with Roketsan executives in July 2022 in Abu Dhabi against the background of the signing of a cooperation agreement between the UAE Space Agency and the Turkish Space Agency. In that meeting with Al Jabri and the Roketsan executives the latter allegedly mentioned that they are developing a co-orbital ASAT with either directed energy or kinetic weapons and the Emirati side apparently expressed some interest. On 3 February 2023 Tactical Report appears to somewhat walk back this story when it says that Emirati officials now believe that Roketsan executives may have exaggerated the status of the ASAT capability. Assuming there is any truth to these stories a Turkish co-orbital ASAT capability obviously raises a lot of questions.
Also in that same Tactical Report story, it is alleged that the UAE is interested in working with Türkiye on the latter’s Göktürk-3 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) Earth observation satellite that is expected to be launched later in 2023. Apparently the UAE is interested in cooperation on how to operate the SAR satellite and it imagery processing and analysis, and even the purchase of the satellite (or one just like it) so that lessons learned can be applied to the Emirati Sirb SAR satellite constellation announced in the summer of 2022.
4 February 2023
The foreign ministers of Türkiye and Argentina signed a cooperative agreement to jointly manufacture communication satellites. The joint venture will see Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAS) and Argentina’s INVAP establish the GSatCom company that will manufacture and market the 2,000 kilogram all electric geostationary communication satellites.
Be sure to catch up with space activities in the region in the next edition of Middle East Space Monitor’s space roundup!