Construction 1 is in the final stretch3 microsatellites total budget of 200 million euros. The first of the three projects, which the Ministry of Digital Governance “runs”, concerns the download and sending satellite imageshas a budget of 60 million euros, is being contracted in the next few days and the signing of the contract with the contractor, Open Cosmos, is expected.

As he characteristically mentioned on the sidelines of the Information Society SA event, the Deputy Minister of Digital Governance, Konstantinos Kyranakisin the summer the contracting is expected for the rest of the satellite projects, totaling 200 million euros, which are financed by the Recovery Fund.

The first project, signed in the following days after the announcement of an Open Public International Tender, with a budget of 60 million euros, concerns the swarm developmentof earth observation satellites. The constellation of satellites will provide data and services to multiple agencies, such as the Ministries of Environment and Energy, Climate Crisis and Civil Protection, Shipping.

Microsatellites will provide data on the dealing with natural disasters, through the development of Thermal Microsatellites and Microsatellite Radars. They will give tremendous possibilities to monitoring and dealing with forest fires, floods and other natural disasters, as they will provide data around the clock.

At the same time, they will also provide data to the competent authorities, to better deal with crises or even multiple crises, which will drastically improve the decision-making process.

“Microsatellites will be in the… air in 2026“, Mr. Kyranakis emphasized, underlining that “everything has run faster than any other competition” and that the interest was more than intense. “We are in the final stage of ratification and contracting. This week the first project will be contracted and by the end of June we will have closed the rest of the projects as well.”

Through the “running” tenders, the Greek State will acquire a total of 13 microsatellites, making important steps for commercial use of space.

How the project will run

After the first project “AXIS 2 CONSTELLATION OF SATELLITES” for the satellite images, according to Mr. Kyranakis, the competition for the collection of thermal data takes its turn. The “AXIS 1.1 THERMAL SPACE SEGMENT” project, with a total budget of 20 million euros, foresees the collection of thermal data in the Greek territory, as well as the parallel development of at least four high-resolution thermal microsatellites. We should mention that by the end of July, the “AXIS 1.2 SAR SPACE SEGMENT” project, with a budget of 33 million euros, which concerns microsatellite radars, is also expected to be contracted. The action has as its object the collection of radar data and the development of at least two radars (SAR-Synthetic Aperture Radar) of very high resolution Microsatellites.

According to Mr. Kyranakis, the bids for the fourth tender, which concerns the “AXIS 3 GOVERNMENTAL HUB” project, with a budget of 17 million euros, for the creation of a Government Data Processing and Distribution Hub, are also pending, underlining that “in order to to run the processes quickly, in the previous months we sent questionnaires to all operators about who will use and how much satellite data. This is a total of 16 agencies. Now we know how much data they use, what kind, the cost and everything that is required to be able to serve the demand.”

It should be noted that until today the bodies in question of the wider public sector use satellite data, which they pay for separately from their budget, while the data they request is often… the same.

Civil Defense through Space

The Space Program of the country was designed by the Ministry of Digital Governance and the Hellenic Space Center, after the natural disasters and fires that hit the country last summer. They aim at strengthening the “protection umbrella”, which is created to protect citizens and national property.

“With the microsatellite system, we will have information with enormous accuracy for all those who need it for civil protection, urban planning, for the illegal use of beaches. This is a huge opportunity and a huge challenge”, recently commented the Minister of Digital Governance, Dimitris Papastergiou.

We remind you that the small satellite projects are implemented through the European Space Agency (ESA) with funding from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan Greece 2.0 and the implementing body is the Ministry of Digital Governance.