O n 18 June 2024, SpaceSUITE’s Project Member Eurisy hosted its annual 2024 General Assembly (GA), which gathered together 24 Eurisy’s members, from national space agencies and government offices to international organisations dealing with space affairs. Eurisy’s GA is the key annual meeting to take stock of the activities performed by the secretariat to meet the objectives set and to share information, exchange experiences, discuss potential partnerships. The 2024 GA was hosted by EUMETSAT, Eurisy’s member, in Darmstad, Germany.

During the Space4Skills panel at the GA, Gabriella Povero from LINKS and Sven Casteleyn from GEOTEC UIJ, both SpaceSUITE’s Project Partners, had the opportunity to present the SpaceSUITE project and its current activities, alongside Maria-Vittoria D’Inzeo from the European Commission DG DEFIS, who addressed the European action plan for skills development, and Dr. Angelos Lazoudis from EA, who presented an Erasmus+ project GEO-Academy and its recently published platform, GEOBSERVE.

During the SpaceSUITE’s presentation, entitled “Towards Skills Intelligence and Body of Knowledge in the space downstream sector,” the project’s recent efforts on skills intelligence and Body of Knowledge were presented. Gabriella explained the methodological framework to gather and map space-related skills in educational offers and professional demand in the Space downstream sector. Sven explained what a Body of Knowledge (BoK) is, how the current EO- and GI-oriented BoK will be extended towards the space downstream sector in the SpaceSUITE project, and how it is used as shared vocabulary in an ecosystem of tools aimed at bridging the skill gap.

Eurisy’s 2024 GA therefore presented an opportunity for increasing the outreach of SpaceSUITE between national space agencies, government offices and international organisations dealing with space affairs, and to interact with other stakeholders in the area of skills development in the space downstream sector, as well as to look for possible synergies between the ongoing EU initiatives.