Space Reps from the BRICS Countries Meet, Discuss Integration

At the first meeting of representatives of the BRICS countries’ space agencies Monday in Zhuhai, China, there was discussion of an agreement for cooperation in space exploration. It was proposed that a Memorandum of Understanding with specific goals be presented at the second planned meeting, to be held in Russia next Spring. Roscosmos head Igor Komarov stated that these meetings of BRICS space agencies would become regular.

This is a ground-breaking initiative, which, by integrating and coordinating the five nations’ space assets, would upgrade the capabilities of each. The first project would be to share remote sensing data. Each one of the BRICS nations has at least one Earth remote sensing satellite in orbit (in the case of China and Brazil, it is a joint program), with different operational capabilities, observing at a variety of wavelengths, and in different orbits. Integrating all the observations would create new data sets that cannot be obtained from any one system.

“The document that we are preparing represents a mechanism that would facilitate cooperation [in space technology] and I hope that we will be able to finalize it in the near future,” said Komarov. Navigation and space research were also reportedly discussed at the meeting.

“We think that, for our countries, going in this direction will allow us to increase the pool of information we receive about Earth, several times,” he added.

This is a challenging proposal. For one reason, some of the data is dual-use, and used by the military in Russia, China, and India. In addition, there are commercial companies that process remote sensing images and then sell them; so, some rules of the road will be needed. Komarov noted that the countries have been thrashing out the legal details of an agreement.

The potential here, naturally, is to see an extension of this cooperative framework to include manned and robotic missions of exploration, already underway by Russia, China, and India, in addition to the widest application of space technologies throughout the BRICS, and the nations along the Space Silk Road.