Asi, how and why the Italian space is in chaos
ASI, more and more bent on ESA's Franco-German division dynamics, risks losing even the last game, the assignment of the Science Directorate to Italy. Here because. The intervention of Paolo Chersei
It is now chaos in the Italian space. The ASI (Italian Space Agency) increasingly bent to the Franco-German division dynamics of ESA, risks losing even the last game, the assignment of the Science Directorate to Italy.
The subtraction would be worrying, because the engagements that gravitate around this directorate involve a massive involvement of both the scientific community and the national industry, including the contribution of the related industries which strongly affects all space programs.
The reasons for the risk of missing for the second time the important appointment of having an Italian Science Director can be summarized in the slovenliness that has enveloped everything that has been in the administration of space activities in Italy for years or more likely in the presumption that at the top of the Agency there are ready some candidacies for the second directorate, Estec, the center of the European agency based in Noordwijk, in the south of Holland. Just the site from which the current president of ASI comes.
But acquiring the management of Estec is technically unlikely for an Italian candidate, given that the outgoing director is another Italian, Franco Ongaro , who moved to the management of Strategie di Leonardo to replace Roberto Cingolani when he was appointed minister in the government of Mario Draghi. The possibility of having two successive directors of the same nationality in an international body is highly unlikely.
What is happening in the Italian space policy is worrying: especially because we are in the imminence of the Ministerial Space Conference in Paris which will assign the new subscriptions of the member states to ESA programs and which sees our country committed for about two billion euros. At the moment it is not known which member of our government will represent Italy and with the weakened Comint – we remind you that the inter-ministerial committee regulated by law 7-2018 has recently deserted the meeting in which the appointment of two additional directors should have been approved administration of the ASI – so it is difficult to justify this "limbo", when the Ministerial Conference 2022 will be held in less than two months.
It is superfluous but no less important to underline that Italy – Esa's third contributor – should claim the top position of the Scientific Directorate and we hope that the next government will adequately understand the value of this position, which would consolidate a national leadership, without letting it decide. to the new Office for Aerospace Policies, hastily set up in Palazzo Chigi last July by Minister Vittorio Colao , a member of an already outgoing government, but driven by the need to give his personal persistence to an executive that has not shown great capacity political-strategic in the space sector.
At this point, if there really is the intention to create a discontinuity with the past, it would be a great mistake to let things go as they have been happening up to now according to the timeless rule of the Leopard.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/asi-come-e-perche-lo-spazio-italiano-e-nel-caos/ on Sun, 02 Oct 2022 07:06:56 +0000.