On January 21, 2019, a conference about possibilities of using satellite techniques by public administration in Poland was held in the Senate of the Republic of Poland.
The conference focused mainly on the use of satellite technologies as one of the objectives that public administration wants to achieve. The use of such solutions may improve the service of citizens, and on the national scale – contribute to the generation of the financial result of the state and increase budget revenues.
The conference was attended by present and former Senators of the Republic of Poland and representatives of the Polish space sector. The conference was opened by Piotr Zientarski, after which Prof. Maria Sierpińska from the Academy of Economics and Humanities took the floor, and then Professor Edmund Wittbrodt from the Gdańsk University of Technology.
President of the Polish Space Agency, dr hab. Grzegorz Brona emphasized one of the three objectives of the Polish Space Strategy adopted in 2017 – Polish public administration will use satellite data for faster and more effective implementation of its tasks, and domestic enterprises will be able to fully satisfy internal demand for such services and export them to other markets.
The President of POLSA reported that satellite techniques and data are not only imaging, but also navigation and telecommunications. In navigation, Europe uses the Galileo program, telecommunications – GovSatCom, but the basis for the use of satellite technologies are data obtained through the internal EU Copernicus program. Poland’s accession to Copernicus has brought tangible results, and the first of these is the signing with the European Space Agency (ESA) contract for the construction of the cooperating ESA segment, which will ensure access to satellite data to all entities in Poland equal to other European countries. The second result is the creation in our country one of the largest operating platform storing all EU satellite data (DIAS platform). The National Space Program created by the Polish Space Agency will, to a large extent, include support for satellite technologies, so that they can be used most effectively in efforts to improve the efficiency of public administration.
Paweł Wojtkiewicz – President of the Polish Space Industry Association pointed to the need for close cooperation between public administration and companies. This is a very important issue, because more and more often in Europe, commercial services and products are designed for administration.
Beata Mikołajek-Zielińska from the Polish Space Agency talked in detail about the National Space Program as an instrument to support the development of the use of satellite technologies in Poland.
The second part of the conference mainly concerned the presentation of the possibilities of using satellite information, including in agriculture, environmental protection and crisis management.
