A strategic agreement was signed last week between the Cyprus Space Exploration Organisation (CSEO) and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens to promote research, industrial training, innovation and entrepreneurship.

The agreement was announced on Friday at a press conference, where CSEO chairman George Danos said cooperation between the organisation and the university’s economics and political science school was taking on a new form that would enhance education, as well as the industrial training necessary for the field of space.

Danos said innovation and entrepreneurship would be promoted through strategic cooperation, supporting young people and creating new businesses. To this end, he added, an agreement was signed recently with the chamber of commerce and industry Keve.

“Our cooperation embraces all this and takes them a step further. In this way, we will support the cluster of businesses that were Cypriot and have now become international,” Danos said, explaining that this would happen through the International Space Agency.

He said there was already a number of programmes that had produced results in the field of space, especially in astronaut health, by the Cyprus Institute of Genetics and Neurology.

Danos furthermore announced that Cyprus would be hosting a world conference in November, which is expected to bring the leaderships of space agencies to the island.

On behalf of the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, Dionysios Tobros said space and its applications were not something that had to be created but was already being developed since the 1950s.

“It is our duty, as is the duty of every nation that wants to participate in the modern world, to expand in this field, as we did in the skies and in ancient times in the seas,” he said.

Tobros added that the economy of space will be approaching €1 trillion over the next few years and thus “we must prepare for this century, where the limit of the atmosphere will not be our limit.”

“There are resources in celestial bodies, such as asteroids, from which in the future we will need to mine basic metals, such as copper or iron, in order not to destroy the environment here on Earth, especially in cases where surface deposits are depleted,” Tobros said.

Dean of the economics and political sciences school Nikolaos Iriotis said the university aspired through its presence in Cyprus to expand research beyond the university framework.

“The area of space is the area we are all pursuing. It is where we all want to end up. We believe it has much to give us, and we must find it and we have joined hands to look for it together,” he added.