What could be a better way to start the new Space season than with the #IAF Spring Meetings 2023?
Our EuroSpaceHub consortium is enthusiastically participating in this conference in Paris, organized as every year by the International Astronautical Federation. These are three special days for the Space community, to come together through committee meetings, take stock of various projects and plan for the main event of the year, the International Astronautical Congress in Baku (IAC), which will take place in October.
The IAF Spring Meetings are taking place in Paris at the New Cap Conference Center this week. The event is three days of intense work for the IAF committees. Work started today and will end Thursday morning with the abstract selection process for the next IAC. The day kicked off in a special way with a collective moment in the name of diversity: the IDEA “3G” Diversity Breakfast. Indeed, this edition of the Spring Meetings 2023 embraces the values of inclusion, diversity and equity and gives much space for sharing ideas and ongoing efforts in this direction. Each day, in fact, collective moments are scheduled in the program of these Spring Meetings, at breakfast and lunch, to give visibility to this topic.
Numerous committees are engaged in the work. Today in particular, meetings were held by: Global Workforce Development Subcommittee, Committee on Integrated Application, Space Habitats Committee, Finance Committee, Workforce Development-Young Professionals Programme Committee, Committee for Liaison with International Organisations and Developing Nations, Advisory Committee on History Activities, Space Systems Committee, Space Economy Committee, Space Life Sciences Committee, Committee on Space Security, Commercial Spaceflight Safety Committee, Earth Observations Committee and GEOSS Subcommittee, Space Power Committee, Committee for the Cultural Utilisation of Space (ITACCUS), Industry Relations Committee (IRC), Committee on Planetary Defense and NEOs, Student Activities Subcommittee, Space Astronomy Technical Committee.
Our EuroSpaceHub team attended several meetings during the day, both to get updates and also to promote our initiative to our international colleagues and experts sitting on the various committees. We took the opportunity to promote an initiative close to our hearts, the Ibiza Space Forum 2023, which EuroSpaceHub is organizing. In the afternoon we followed with particular attention the ITACCUS committee, chaired by Prof Bernard Foing, CEO of Lunex EuroMoonMars, one of our founding partners. The ITACCUS committee (Committee for the Cultural Utilisation Of Space) brings together under its umbrella artists, creatives and architects who turn Space into art. The participants have varied backgrounds and it is fascinating to see the variety of the initiatives they are proposing. However, they always have one central theme: a passion for Space and its creative cultural promotion. We took the opportunity of such an inspiring audience to involve some of them in our Ibiza Space Festival 2023 and you will get to meet some of them among the speakers on the panel dedicated to Space Humanities (Philosophy, Art and Poetry).
We are very pleased with this first day of #IAFSpringMeetings and look forward with curiosity and excitement to the committee meetings that will take place tomorrow. Tomorrow we will also be joined by our Lithuanian partners, with representatives from VilniusTech, and we will use the opportunity to catch up on developments in our @eurospacehub project.
Follow us on our @instagram page for all the content and live updates!