Transcripts

What You Missed On The Vector Episode 10: Emerging Space

Written by: Morsiell Dormu

In this insightful episode of The Vector, host Kelli Kedis Ogborn sits down with Michal Brichta, Director of the Slovak Space Office – Industry Branch, to discuss emerging space markets, ecosystem development, and the role of new space nations in the global economy. Brichta has played a critical role in positioning Slovakia as a rising space player, integrating policy, industry, and international partnerships to drive growth.

Key Highlights Include:

Building a National Space Ecosystem from the Ground Up

  • Slovakia has a rich space heritage, dating back to Czechoslovakia’s early contributions to human spaceflight and scientific research.
  • The Slovak Space Office, officially established in 2021, focuses on industry development, internationalization, and policy coordination to strengthen Slovakia’s presence in the space economy.
  • Early initiatives, such as business incubation programs and outreach efforts, have rapidly expanded the country’s space sector.

Attracting Industry and Investment

  • Slovakia’s space development was triggered by a foreign investment project that highlighted key barriers, including a small ecosystem size and limited international visibility.
  • The government’s response was to grow the ecosystem by integrating existing industrial capabilities (electronics, IT, and advanced manufacturing) into the space sector.
  • Spin-in approach: Many Slovak companies with expertise in terrestrial industries were identified as potential space suppliers, accelerating the sector’s growth.

Space Business Incubation and Collaboration

  • Spaceport SK, Slovakia’s unique space business incubation program, combines startup incubation with industry apprenticeship by embedding new space ventures within experienced space companies.
  • Unlike traditional incubators, startups are paired with established companies, ensuring hands-on mentorship, real-world applications, and stronger commercial viability.
  • The model fosters synergies, workforce development, and supply chain integration, making it easier for startups to scale.

Integrating Space with Broader Industries and Technologies

  • AI and blockchain are being leveraged for supply chain monitoring, secure satellite communication, and Earth observation analytics.
  • Slovakia’s automotive and advanced manufacturing sectors offer expertise in complex supply chains, providing an advantage for developing space-related technologies.
  • The growing private investment landscape in space is drawing interest from investors who may not initially recognize their connection to space markets.

The Role of Governments in Emerging Space Markets

  • Government-backed ecosystem development is essential for new space nations to compete globally.
  • Slovakia’s approach balances public investment with private sector involvement, aiming to nurture a self-sustaining space industry rather than relying solely on government funding.
  • The internationalization strategy includes aggressively seeking partnerships, showcasing Slovakia’s capabilities abroad, and ensuring small companies can access global supply chains.

The Future of Global Space Collaboration

  • With 92 countries actively participating in space, international cooperation is critical for sustainable growth.
  • The global space economy is transitioning toward greater commercialization, requiring collaboration between governments, private industry, and emerging nations.
  • Slovakia aims to position itself as a valuable international partner, contributing unique capabilities and expertise to global space initiatives.

This episode provides a roadmap for emerging space nations and companies looking to integrate into the global space economy. It highlights how strategic government support, industry partnerships, and international collaboration can drive long-term, sustainable growth in space commerce.

 

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Episode Transcript:

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Vector where we discuss topics, trends, and insights driving the global space ecosystem. I am your host Kelli Kedis Ogborn, and I’m so thrilled to be joined today by Michal Brichta, who is co-founder of the newly established Slovak Space office and the head of its industry branch working under the Slovak Investment and Trade Development Agency, which is part of the Ministry of the Economy of the Slovak Republic. In 2019, he initiated a new strategic approach to the comprehensive development of national space industry capabilities. Building on this approach, his team works today to support the further development of the Slovak space sector and its internationalization with a focus on the full utilization of the country’s strong industrial and r and d potential. He is also the Slovak Delegate in the Council of the European Space Agency and the chair of the newly created IAF European subcommittee. And as a personal note, I will add that he truly is a champion in this field of emerging space and he does put on the Emerging Space Conference, which I had the honor of participating in this past May in broad lava. So Michal, thank you so much for joining today.

Michal Brichta:

Thank you for having me.

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

So to set the stage, and it really wasn’t hyperbole to say that you really have been a champion in a pioneer in not only distilling what the concept of emerging spaces, but also being able to highlight opportunities for countries that might want to get into the space sector or for some of the industries that are space curious. So your office in particular is quite interesting because you’ve had a tremendous explosion in two to three years. So the office, as I understand it, was formally formed in 2021, and then you became an associate member of the European Space Agency in 2022. And then within that timeframe as well, you’ve been doing really interesting work in the area of space business incubation and really reaching out to a lot of your other neighboring countries. So congratulations on all this success over a short amount of time. And I’m curious if you could just tell us a bit more about the Slovak Space Office, what the impetus was, why you formed it and how you see it growing.

Michal Brichta:

Thank you. And well, to start, it’s important to say that all these things have been going on quite recently what you were mentioning, but in fact, we were building up on quite strong heritage, especially when it comes to space r and d. And in fact, maybe a few people know about Czechoslovakia, of which now Slovakia is one of the two successor states was the third country to put a human in space after the Soviet Union and United States. And as early as in 1970s, our scientists were working on space hardware development on scientific payload. So there has been some strong heritage on which we were able now to build upon. But of course when it comes to the space ecosystem in its current sense, this is something that just started rather recently and it was back in 2019 when we as a governmental agency focused on the international trade and investment support identified that there is a strong need to work more intensively on space domain as a sector, which brings a lot of possibilities to our companies here in Slovakia, a sector which is dynamically growing sector where we have strong potential and where we truly need to catch up because frankly speaking, when in 2019 we looked around ourselves, most of the countries in Europe were much further ahead.

So we understood that as a government we need to do something as a governmental organization and we need to really start catching up. So that’s why we initiated several new activities, especially around helping new companies enter the sector and internationalize their activities to find their partners. And through this, basically the first ecosystem built activities started and then it resulted since these activities were successful, it resulted into sort of a government or joint venture, which is now called the Sak space office with the Ministry of Education Science resurgence support. They are the political stakeholders and we are the implementation stakeholders and together building up the Slovak space office as a joint activity and joint project, which covers both the policy side and also the implementation sites. So working on the space sector development on internationalization of the activities of our companies and researchers. And last but not least, also on the outreach.

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

Yeah, your model is really interesting and how you’ve been able to combine the policy with the industry in such an intricate way. And I’m curious, two follow-up questions to what you just said. So one understanding that conceptually people are always thinking about space or you can’t not, right. So I’m curious if there was one particular reason why space became more on the forefront in 2019. You did mention that other countries around you were further along, but I’m curious if there was one sector driving it or one particular incident that made you realize that you wanted to develop it. And then the second piece is I’m just curious in terms of the formation, how you went about selling, why space was important in country to get all these stakeholders to buy in?

Michal Brichta:

That’s a two very good question. So to start with the first one, in fact, there was one investment projects which we were working on. So back then I was working as a consultant in the investment department. So we were

Among other things, attracting foreign investments for Slovakia. And there was one potential investment project which at the end well didn’t realize and didn’t materialize, but in fact it help us in a way that it was sort of a trigger that put other things in motion. And it helped us to understand that there are some specific challenges in this particular sector that are slowing down its potential growth and these two challenges or to specific challenges where the limited size of the ecosystem, which meant that it’s challenging to create synergies. So if you have very limited ecosystem in the ecosystem, what you want is that the stakeholders are interacting and they are synergetic and they’re complimentary

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

In

Michal Brichta:

Case the ecosystem is too small. This is very challenging and very, very limited possibility to do so because they have hard time to find a synergy. So we understood that if we want to actually start building up ecosystem, it may sound very simple, but actually one of the first step is really you need to reach certain size where you can have several stakeholders doing at least remotely similar things or working in similar areas. And the second challenge was that being a newer player, being a newer country in this whole game, there was very little knowledge abroad what we can do. And well, as I mentioned, there was strong heritage, decades of heritage, and there were already companies working in space economy, but basically outside the borders of our country there was very little knowledge about this. So we understood that A, we have to grow the ecosystem, we need to make possible for the synergies, and B, we need to start helping it to grow abroad, to attract the attention of the foreign partners, to show the foreign partners what we can do and what the possibilities of collaboration are.

So I would say that this investment actually triggered the fact that we understood both the possibility the sector is bringing, the potential we have and the challenges that we have to well basically tackle the challenges that we have to address so it can further grow. And when it comes to the sectors that you were talking about, this in fact was something that we at first started thinking about. It was one of the first thing that we understood that we have to analyze the potential how the sector can grow. And one of these sources of potential in fact was the terrestrial sectors that we have in the country. So for Slovakia, the strong areas for past decades were hypersize machinery for example, or electronics or IT sectors. And we all know that these are actually quite good starting points for new space companies. And we understood that if we are building a new ecosystem, it’s definitely worth not jump straight only to startups and to creating new ventures while we still have sort of a waiting list of potential strong technological terrestrial companies which we can address and which we can reach out to and to work with them together to find out whether they do possess some technology which could be used in space.

And as a matter of fact, there were many of those companies and actually this particular tool of spinning in towards SpaceX turned out to be one of the core of the dynamic growth that we encountered for the past couple of years. And most of the new companies were in the startups, but most of the new companies actually where terrestrial companies, even some medium-sized companies or larger companies that understood that they actually already do something and they possess some technological capability that if modified and further developed can find some great application in space industry. For them it was a great motivation because they perceive space as really final frontier, but also from the perspective of technological complexness. So for them it was highly interesting to find out that we are really good if we can really do something in space using what we already have developed.

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

Oh, absolutely. I think that is one of the main reasons that you and I clicked when we first met because it’s the practical tangible approach and the way that you’ve structured it is looking at both upstream and downstream, but primarily looking at what your industry already has to bear. Because like you said, there was this really strong heritage that locally was understood but probably not further developed. And internationally definitely not understood in terms of the heritage, but you also have a really strong undercurrent of fascinating technologies. And I mentioned in the beginning your Spaceport SK project, which I had the privilege of being on the advisory board for. So I got to see a bit of a sneak peek into the really cutting edge technologies that are coming online. And what I found so fascinating is that they weren’t farfetched. You guys weren’t putting forward startups that might only have relevance in 10 years when asteroid mining or other things become a reality. They’re very heavily rooted in helping terrestrial life now but have space applications. And so I’m wondering if you could touch a bit upon those because you touched upon the legacy industries, but what are some of the transformative technologies coming out of Slovakia that you’re very excited about that your companies can be able to insert into the space chain?

Michal Brichta:

Absolutely, and first of all, I want to also use this opportunity to thank you for being part of the Spaceport SK and of its second batch as member of the advisory board. We really appreciate your presence there. And also, my honor, it was so fun, especially bringing the US perspective because for European space startup world, I would say in many aspects the US startup world is sort of a role model because of the amount of venture capital and amount of private investments which is involved in the space sector in the us. So also in this aspect in whole Europe, I would say we have some catching up to do and talking about the space board, it might have something to do with the fact that the space board as we build it is a little bit specific startup incubation program because it’s sort of a combination between the classical incubation and apprenticeship in a way.

Because the way how it works is that we do not put the startups in one physical space, but at the very beginning of each batch or before each batch is put together, we approach our companies, our space companies in Slovakia, which already have experience, they’re working on the projects and we ask them to be our partners in the batch, which means that each of those has to propose some topics and pledge that they’re willing to incubate the startup physically in their premises. So we are actually looking for a bunch of startups like the past the second batch, we were looking for seven startups, but each of those is connected to existing experience based company in SLO ecosystem. And this is done because we want to ensure some, again, synergies of the newcomers with the existing ones. It also makes sure that as you mentioned, that the topics were pretty much practical and they were not looking at two futuristic topics, but topics which can be worked on right now.

And it’s a win-win situation because we give the experienced companies in our space ecosystem a chance to bring on board to new young, talented people. We give them chance to have some external team of young talented people working on the challenges. So there is several scenarios which we all consider to be success ranging from the fact that they’ll simply employ the young people, which is great because we end up by extending the number of people working in space industrial in Slovakia. Secondly, it can lead to some mutual projects or some joint venture between the new team and the startup or the space company. And last but not least, it can end up by simply creating a new startup which only collaborates on some basis with experienced companies. So this is the specific mechanism that we started from the first batch and we saw that it really makes a great sense, especially for a small ecosystem because we make sure that there is already from the beginning of this project, there are synergies being created with the experienced one. They help us to mentor on technical level these people, and it brings to the experienced one also a great deal of added value. That’s why we see even growing interest from our companies, from our space ecosystem in the upcoming batch. So right now we already know that for batch free we have even more interested partners for being the incubation partners in the incubation program.

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

The partner piece is key really because you’re building in that supply chain in terms of whatever it looks like, like you said, whether it’s hiring them to be part of the more legacy company, creating something new. But one of the things that I think is really difficult in terms of how sometimes innovation incubators are created is they focus on the doing, or sorry, they focus on the information and not so much on the doing. And sometimes the companies once they leave, the onus is still on them to figure out what to do with the information they learned. And sometimes that is the most difficult piece. So by having this community around them, I think you’re going to get these companies a lot further than potentially if you didn’t have that aspect. And I do have one question from the chat that I want to pull in and throw to you. So the question, and it’s still on this theme of integration, but how can we integrate the space with supply chains using technologies like blockchain and ai? And I know that you had some technologies focused on that, so I’m curious your thoughts.

Michal Brichta:

Yes. So space is basically, it’s literally a space where we can do activities. So that’s why I prefer term space economy rather than space industry because it shows larger aggregation of topics and possibilities. So in this regard, technologies like blockchain and ai, they can play a vital role in variety of applications. For example, even right now we have some companies that are using blockchain technology for example, for monitoring of the supply chain. We have a blockchain company that is working on a specific solution for securing the communication between satellites and ground. As for ai, we know that this is now quite a hot topic when it comes to, for example, the earth observation market.

So there is a great deal of connections between these. I mean if something space definitely shows and space economy definitely shows that it can integrate a lot of technological capabilities, as I mentioned from our experience ranging from machinery, electronics, even from automotive, which is very strong sector in Slovakia. And usually well people picture the assembly lines that are putting cars together. They cannot really create a link in their minds between this and space. But the automotive supply chain is extremely complex. And while there we have five final manufacturers of cars in Slovakia, there is about 400 companies within their value chain. And many of these s, they have strong technological capabilities. So this is exactly what you want to target when you’re building up a new space ecosystem. You definitely want to target this high tech and even in some cases mid tech companies that can have some small piece in the whole puzzle, which can be technologically interesting and well definitely technologies like AI and blockchain, they have tremendous possibilities and they bring tremendous possibilities to such a technological field like space economy.

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

Absolutely. I think that’s probably the perfect analogy for downstream capabilities because especially if you look at a lot of these verticals that are driving markets, it’s a lot of the very tangible machinery hardware that’s going to enable its growth. And one of the things that we always talk about at Space Commerce Institute is getting people to self-select in and understand where they are in the value chain, how they help the broader verticals growing. And when you start to peel back the onion in that way, I think people realize that there is a personal heritage for them but also an industry heritage and they can understand how they’re part of the broader growth strategy of the space economy. Shifting gears slightly, so we covered the tech piece and I want to build upon something you said earlier and just broaden it. So we talked a bit about how you brought together the different stakeholders within Slovakia. So the industry, your policy makers, but globally the space economy is global and while there are still certain countries that drive investment and growth, we now have 92 countries that are participating in space, which is amazing and fascinating, but that means that there’s a lot more stakeholders at play. So there’s everything from the role of governments to the role of private companies and then really the need for international collaboration. And so I’m curious from your perspective, how do you see these different entities collaborating, conflicting? What is your take?

Michal Brichta:

I would say that these roles, of course they are shifting, especially when now the space is becoming more and more commercially focused and more and more broad with new markets emerging. So originally we were thinking about government’s role mostly in terms of regulation and also being the customer of the space programs and space projects. I would say especially in case of newer and emerging space fairing countries with emerging space ecosystems, the role of government also should be focused on actual ecosystem buildup and an internationalization. And the reason is that having a working ecosystem for this kind of new emerging country, there is a lot of public interest in it because

This creates a lot of public added value and added value that cannot just grasp by, for example, a large company that would take this leading role in a country. Of course you can have a really significantly large company, which is basically the main actor in the whole ecosystem in the country, but in that case, the whole ecosystem built around this company will be basically serving needs of the company. While we know that for us the well-working space ecosystem, it that it creates a lot of side added value in terms of STEM education, in terms of spillover effect to terrestrial sectors in terms of technology transfer to other sectors and also of course the environmental and social aspects of the benefits of these activities. So there is basically in order to really develop a new space ecosystem ranging from stakeholders like companies and research and academia and universities to users and other important stakeholders, even for example the investment community and private investors, without government playing certain stimulating or even coordinating role, it might be quite difficult and challenging and definitely it’ll take longer time.

So we see it on our example that things were moving much slower before we actually started being active in this area. And before we started taking active part actually on the ecosystem buildup and after we did so things started growing and developing quite dynamically. So definitely from the government’s perspective, the role of buildup and also of internationalization because again, if new companies, especially when we talk about for example, the European space area of European space ecosystem, then for the smaller and newer companies coming from these newer countries, it’s difficult to directly compete and to penetrate the value chains just like that of the well established older and larger companies. So without governmental support that will simply start kicking out the doors literally and showing the possibilities to those large partners doing or running the extra mile to actually save the time and energy for the large partners doing their own research and providing some possibilities directly and showing them what’s possible and whatnot.

Without this, it’s very difficult for the smaller newer companies to actually penetrate these value chains from the perspective of the other stakeholders. For example, the companies of course they have the vital role in space ecosystem because they are actually the core of the space ecosystem developing the solutions. They are also customers for each other, they are also partners for each other and they’re also partners for the government because they help us with the, let’s say, outreach to young generation with outreach to public. They help us with outreach to potential new members of the community. So it’s also very important space being a highly collaborative and highly international. And again, especially when we talk about smaller countries like Slovakia, Slovakia, just for the full picture of Slovakia is a country of 5.5 million people. So it’s definitely necessary for us for such a technologically complex and of course very expensive projects to seek partnerships and to team up. And I truly believe that every country in the world has something to offer to international space corporation. And in order to tackle the challenges that we are facing out on earth and the possibilities that the space is bringing up beyond earth’s horizons, we definitely need to pull together all the resources and pull together the collaboration possibilities of all the countries as many as possible.

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

You framed that beautifully and you’re definitely resonating a lot because seeing a lot of comments about that space exploration should have no limits and that space should be available for all. And I liked how you posited the ebb and flow of the different stakeholders because you’re right, I mean for our collective wish of how we want space to expand, it can’t just be government, it can’t just be private sector. And each person does have a role. What’s interesting, you talked about private really being the heart and soul and in many ways, I mean they are pushing the boundaries of technological capability. And what I think is interesting is that we can guess what the landscape is going to look like in five to 10 years, but the agility of the private sector is going to be putting things online that we can just do new things with that we never thought we could.

And if you also look at the funding disparity, we just unveiled our new space economy number last month and it came at a 546000000078% of that is private investment, global private investment, and ROI. And then 22% is global government spending. And so to your point, the government invests less, however, they are the regulator, they are the customer, and in many ways they can engender these relationships between large and small companies, especially if there’s an agile company in a country, they want to be a supplier, they still have that ability to create that value chain. And it’s critical because a lot of people will think about the future of space and say, I only want to work in the private sector, or I only want to work in government and that doesn’t exist anymore. And to your point about international collaboration, I only want to work for this country. And it’s like, but we all work together and it’s just increasingly becoming that way.

Michal Brichta:

Yeah, that’s the beauty of the space sector.

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

So in terms of just creating this sort of healthy ebb and flow, what are some of the hallmarks, I will say, of a sustainable ecosystem? So what needs to be in place and then what are some of the challenges that you think can come about in creating ecosystems for emerging space?

Michal Brichta:

Well, we already a bit tackled this that for healthy ecosystem means that there is possibility of synergy, there is possibility of interaction between the stakeholders and they are complimentary to each other. So I would say that healthy ecosystem is one that doesn’t only rely on few stakeholders, but rather is quite diverse and diversified and it’s also not relying on one stream of investment because then well placing everything on one card, it can eventually be dangerous and not really sustainable way to do things. So it’s definitely ecosystem which is also diversifying the stream of investment and the sources of investment. That’s a great point. And also if we talk about ecosystem, which is on a national level, on the level of a country, then definitely it should be one which is not concentrated just in one part of the country but rather trying to involve other regions.

In our case for example, we’ve also started understanding that for us, definitely the capital, Brads lava is the key economic center of course, and also technological center. Nevertheless, we understand that there are several other cities which for example have technological universities, they have some even r and d or business heritage in space. So now we are trying to also proactively approach these other technological centers and help them start more actively developing their local ecosystems. So they really form the national ecosystem from various geographical points of the country. And well, the health ecosystem is also collaborative and proactive. So what is one of the things that I like the most when I see it is when there are new and new community driven space events and space activities in our country. Maybe somebody from the governmental side, somebody from the ecosystem building side would say why they are doing this on their own.

I mean we should do it, but I don’t think it’s a healthy approach to try to do everything in ecosystem. Again, it should be a variety of stakeholders really showing their proactivity, not just the government but also the companies or some NGOs or universities. So health ecosystem is where a variety of stakeholders is really being proactive and trying to move things forward. So that’s really the healthy one. And challenges, well, it’s of course depending on each country or well, depending on what kind of ecosystem we’re talking about, in our case, it truly was the size and the international non awareness or lack of awareness which we had to tackle from the beginning. So this is something which is getting better and we see that it really results in a nicely growing ecosystem and in healthy growing ecosystem.

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

And one aspect of the ecosystem that we sort of touched upon but not in depth is the public. So you did mention that there’s industry, there’s technology, but there’s also STEM education and others. And one of the questions that came through, which I’m curious if you could touch upon, but they want to know how digital engagement and internet helps integrate the public into the space economy. I know that from our perspective at the Space Foundation, it’s really important to tell the space story and why space to get people to buy into why we are even doing economic activity. And so I know that you did a lot of outreach with the emerging space conference and you guys are very active in present in your digital platform. And so how have you seen that help integrate the public into what you’re doing in Slovakia?

Michal Brichta:

I would see it on two levels. One is the form of course, I mean digital means of communication of course help us broaden the outreach and dissemination of information among others. Also about the benefits and the results of space exploration and space technology development. But also there is the content side, and that’s the fact that digital technologies actually being part of the value chain of downstream space are the connection between the society and space industry. And this is the part of space economy, which is possibly for the broader amount of people and for broader public, the easiest to understand and comprehend and then also appreciate because it’s something which is directly involved in their lives. So for example, for us for doing outreach with the broader public, it’s usually strongly focused on downstream and communicating how interconnected we are with the space technology and how difficult it would be to imagine living without a satellite technology, for example, not just in our everyday life or the everyday things including the navigation technology or the weather forecast or the banking services. Also talking

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

Right now with people all over the world watching,

Michal Brichta:

Yeah, for example, but also it would be difficult to imagine many terrestrial sectors of our economy working the way they work without satellite technology. So I would say that really the digital connection and the connection between the data and the satellite and the space and people is maybe the fastest possible way for the broader public to actually appreciate the space technology. I understand the space technology and why it is a good investment after all, and why it is an investment and not the cost at all because of all the return that we are getting from economic, social, and also environmental point of view.

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

And I think also just going one step further too, beyond the appreciation and understanding on the investment, but being able to also then think creatively about how they can use space technology and space data for new entrepreneurial activities that might engender more economic activity. A lot of companies that are very downstream that might not be working on a space problem but are connected to space. And so it brings the picture a bit more holistically.

Michal Brichta:

Absolutely. And it’s also sometimes a good entry point for the private investors. And this is something which we learn here in Slovakia for example, that when approaching the private investors, usually the easiest entry point for them again is downstream. And that’s for a variety of reasons. Of course it’s the shorter investment cycle, the return of investment, it’s faster, et cetera. But it’s also the fact that these downstream domains, they are usually connected to some terrestrial sector, which these private investors might already have in their portfolio. And quite often we had that kind of situation that we talked with some VC fund, whether or not they would like to work in space and they told, ah, it’s too futuristic and we don’t, don’t understand the sector, we don’t know about it. And then we ask them what they do. And when they explain us what sectors they cover, we told them, okay, but you actually already do space economy. Absolutely, you have green technology, you have smart transportation, you have this and this for that. Sometimes not just the investors, but also in sometimes these technological companies which are suitable for spinning in understand that they are closer to space economy than they realize.

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

Yep. I can’t agree more. I think that you make it feel more localized and get people to understand that they’re already engaged and then it starts to have this snowball effect. So you’ve already given us so much great advice and created a really good framework. But final thoughts because I would be remiss if I didn’t have a chance to ask you, so we have viewers watching right now everywhere from Slovenia, Africa, India. And what advice would you give to other countries that want to grow their space presence?

Michal Brichta:

It’s of course difficult to give a generalistic advice because well, every country is in a different situation size wise, heritage wise. And for example, in Europe, we have a great deal of advantage from having this infrastructure like European Space Agency or the joint space program of European Union because it really helps the small players to get into a larger common projects. But if I was to somehow try to generalize it a bit, I would mention three key aspects of how we are trying to approach the space economy and space ecosystem. And that’s firstly to utilize the full potential of one space ecosystem and well technological ecosystem in general, starting with actually understanding what potential you have to work with as we did in 2019. Again, every country it would probably have in a very different way. That’s why it’s important to start with analyzing where the potential is.

In our case, it was the combination of the young entrepreneurial spirit connected to this new space growth combined with all the research heritage dating back to really decades back and combined with this strong technology industry background. So in every country it can be different, but in our case it was designed, it was important that from the beginning we started thinking about it because especially if it is a smaller country like Slovakia, we cannot really afford wasting the potential. We cannot just focus on one aspect. We cannot just jump to startups, only do startups because it’s really wasting the technological potential that we have. And when you’re starting building the ecosystem, you really want to fully utilize it. Secondly, it would be the diversification investments and diversification of markets that the ecosystem is focused on and the country is focused on for similar reason. You want to fully utilize the potential also from the financial point of view and financial perspective.

So you do not want to again, place everything on one card. You do not want to be fully dependent on one investment stream, especially with space becoming more and more commercially focused and creating new and new markets which are of commercial interest. What we definitely do is not to build a sector which is fully dependent only on public money. In contrary, we want to build a sector which is nourished by public money, but then in some point it’s able to attract also private investors to further grow. And thirdly, it would be, well, as we mentioned, space is international and space is a globalized area, so do your best. Or what we do is we try to do our best to bring added value to some joint international collaboration. And we simply try to be a good and an interesting partner. And this means that as a newcomer, we have to run the extra mile, we have to do the extra thinking and effort, how we can bring added value to the larger stakeholders, why we can bring something new rather than duplicity.

And for that to ensure that we’ll be sought partners and interesting partners. And that also means that a country can think about it not just from the technological point of view, but also from point of view what for example, the government and the government organizations like ours can bring to this joint table. For example, the topic of supporting each other when it comes to the emerging space for an ecosystem. So I would say fully utilize your potential diversified the investments in markets, and well be a valid player and bring added value to international space community.

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

Those are extremely thoughtful and very valuable pieces of advice. And I think a really good place to leave this conversation. I know we could probably continue on for an hour more, but I really appreciate your time today. It’s evident in the two years that you guys have existed that you’ve definitely planted the flag and are growing and I think it’s a good place to emulate for other countries wanting to do similar things. So your insights were really, really critical. And thank you for sharing them today.

Michal Brichta:

Thank you. It was great to discuss this with you.

Kelli Kedis Ogborn:

Absolutely. And thank you to all of our viewers for writing in your questions, staying engaged. Please stay tuned for future vector conversations and please remember that there’s a place for everyone in the global space ecosystem. See you later.

 



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