Q&A With ESA PECS Manager

What exactly is a PECS?

PECS stands for Plan for European Cooperating States. It is designed to help European countries, particularly those that joined the EU after 2004, to join the Agency. At present, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Romania have signed the PECS Charter and Poland is scheduled to sign within April 2008.

Briefly, how it works is that once a country expresses interest in becoming in the near future a full ESA Member then a European Cooperating State (ECS) Agreement is drawn up, such as that signed recently on 27 April with Poland.

The ECS Agreement, which allows a country to participate in ESA procurements and activities, should be converted within a year into a PECS Charter, a five-year plan jointly agreed between ESA and the country concerned. In these five years, the country performs a number of activities, mostly in research and development, to help it develop expertise within its space industry.

At the end of the five-year period ESA will assess the progress made and decide whether the country is ready to become a full member of ESA or whether another five-year plan should be drawn up.

This seems quite a long-drawn out process?

It is, but it is in the interest of the country concerned. As you may know, each Member State should ideally receive a return of 90% of its contribution to ESA in the form of procurements and contracts. However, this presupposes that its space industry is sufficiently developed to enable it to compete with other Member States for contracts.

It takes time to build and strengthen a space industry network. The five years spent under the PECS Charter enable a country to increase its knowledge of ESA and develop its space industry system, thus improving its chances of winning contracts.

What does your job entail?

The PECS Office is a small unit consisting of myself and an administrative assistant. On signing the PECS Charter each country agrees to commit a minimum of €1 million per year - some commit more - to be spent strengthening their space industry.

Once the ECS Agreement is signed, then it is my job to help the country identify the type of ESA projects that best suit them and generally provide guidance during the five years.

Previously PECS came under the Science Directorate, I see it now comes under TEN, the Directorate of Telecommunications and Navigation.

Yes, from 1 January this year we come under TEN. The reason for the move was that initially non ESA Member States were involved mainly in Science programmes but in recent years, more countries have expressed interest in participating in all ESA activities so it was felt more appropriate for PECS to come under TEN.

Briefly, why is PECS important for ESA?

PECS is helping to strengthen Europe's scientific and industrial base as well as ESA's links with the EU. The more EU countries join ESA, the stronger the links between the Agency and Brussels will become.

For more information about PECS, contact:

Stephen Airey
Head of Section New, Cooperating and Associate States
Tel. +31 (0) 7156 55295