LEITAT @ SPACE in H2020 Infoday, Toulouse

On the 2nd of July, LEITAT attended the International Information day H2020 Space held within the Toulouse Space Show 2014 in Toulouse, France.

 

The session started with a conference from representatives of the European Commission and the Research Executive Agency (REA), who outlined the work programme for the upcoming Space call on November and also stated the lessons learned from the first call of 2014, such as budget allocation, proposals received (212 for the 2014 call), competitiveness of the sector and so on. Special mention was made for the SME Instrument, where for Space a total of 128 proposals where received (giving a 3.9% success rate since only 5 projects will be funded).

 

This information was used to establish the procedure of the next work programme for 2016, which should be published around the end of July. The opening of 2016 calls will be around November 2014, being the first deadline around April 2015 (though these dates are, still, provisional).

 

 

After that first session and a productive coffee break, the Space Key Actors gave a presentation of their companies and their research interests for H2020: Airbus Defense and Space, Aerospace Valley, Thales Alenia Space and CNES.

 

Then, several companies, universities and research institutions gave short presentations to look for partners in the Space call.

 

After the lunch break, two parallel topic sessions took place. One, regarding Space Exploration and Science including ISS, outlined the specific aspects of the call and the access to the ISS for research projects was explained in detail by ESA. The other session, regarding Galileo & Copernicus applications, explained the background information in these topics and the upcoming events of that promising field of European research within H2020.

 

The event finalised with a brokerage session where the participants had a better chance to get to know each other and build partnerships for the Space call in H2020.