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10 Questions

with Petr Bareš
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By Paul Voosen
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 15th, 2007 issue

Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST
Petr Bareš, director of the Czech Space Alliance, talks about the nation's ESA membership and its rich space tradition.
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THE BAREŠ FILE

Job title: Director, Czech Space Alliance; managing director, Iguassu Software Systems
Age: 59
Nationality: Czech
Former positions: Managing director, Anite/Cray Systems, Spain; 12 years with the European Space Agency
Education: M.Sc. in Computer Science, University of London

In 2005, the Czech Republic became a partial member of the European Space Agency (ESA). Since then, industry collaboration with the agency has floundered. On Aug. 1, Iguassu Software Systems announced that it is the first domestic company to win a competitive tender from ESA. Iguassu’s owner, Petr Bareš, is also director of the Czech Space Alliance, founded in cooperation with CzechTrade last year to promote space investment. Bareš talks to The Prague Post about satellite imaging, the history of Czechs in space and the country’s stagnating entry to ESA.
➊ What are the details of your recently awarded contract?
The contract is for earth observation. We are co-developing a set of tools that will allow ESA to select information from pictures. When a person looks at a picture, he can see, ‘This is a river and this is a car,’ even when it’s not in color, because of the shapes. A computer has to learn some tricks to be able to do this.
Our contribution is adapting this to grid technology, which is a way of distributing processing to a number of computers. ESA needs this because analyzing satellite images requires massive computing power. Since it’s so intensive, 80 percent to 90 percent of all satellite pictures aren’t processed and so they’re unusable. Our project will speed this up.
➋ Why should the Czech Republic want to join ESA?
Well, ESA is a grouping of countries that want to share their resources in developing space projects, and it includes non-EU members, like Norway and Switzerland. None of the new EU countries is in ESA.
It’s similar to NASA, on a smaller scale. Its objective is not scientific research, which is a common assumption. The objective is to improve industry competitiveness. The space and science are there to push technology — it’s not easy to go to the moon or to Mars, and that will help companies be competitive with the Americans.
ESA also does earth observation — satellites — which is very practical nowadays. Telecommunications used to be purely research when I started at ESA in 1975, but now it’s just business. That’s part of the process. You develop technology with government money, and, once it’s viable, it’s passed to industry. This isn’t unwitting — it’s the goal. Iguassu is trying to do this already. We’re negotiating with Japan for a satellite-navigation project that uses technology we developed for ESA.
➌ The country is only a partial member of ESA. Why is that?
In order to become full members of ESA, we’ll have to win all of our projects through competitive tenders, at least 8 million euros [$11 million/225 million Kč] worth. The last few countries that joined ESA caused problems. ESA has a rule that the money a country puts in has to go back again to the country in project contracts. But the contracts have to be won competitively. So if a country is incapable of winning work, then ESA is stuck with a pot of money. Then they have to start bending the rules of competition and giving priorities — quite contrary to ESA’s objectives.
➍ How’d they go about solving this problem?
They designed a program called PECS — Plan for European Cooperating States — for the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Romania. Instead of starting with 8 million euros, the minimum the Czech Republic would have to pay to participate was 1 million euros. The objective was that within five years we’d grow to 8 million and become full members.
Hungary is always a step ahead of us, while Romania just joined PECS and Poland is still in discussions. I can talk to friends and former colleagues in an informal way at ESA, and they tell me Hungary does not have much of an industry, but they have a great space office. Here, we have industry with lots of potential. If we had representation like Hungary, we’d be far, far ahead.
➎ Was the Czech Space Alliance founded because of problems with the country’s space office?
We’re stagnating. We’ve been in PECS for two and a half years and we’re still at the minimum. Gallingly, some say that perhaps Czech industry is unable to win more work. The Czech Space Office [CSO], which administers ESA negotiations, says we’ll be full members in one or two years’ time, which is impossible without a change in attitude.
Most companies don’t know about the opportunities at ESA. They go to a CSO event and are put off by its over-emphasis on science. We have to rush after these companies, grab them by the collar and say, ‘Look, it’s a lot easier than it sounds. It’s not at all about science. We don’t know anything about comets or cosmic rays either.’
Space technology is the same as if we contracted for a factory. There’s a lot that a competent technology company can deliver to ESA, but the CSO does not have the industrial experience to promote this. That’s why we created the alliance — to promote the idea that anyone who’s willing to have a go at ESA contracts has a chance and can even make a bit of profit.
➏ Is it difficult for small companies to compete for ESA contracts?
That’s another reason for the alliance. We saw that ESA is trying to help small companies and encouraging countries to create associations like ours. ESA is always pushing to spread the know-how. If one company wins too many times, they try to push work toward another company, a different country. And they ask that companies apply for projects jointly. This way the load is spread around.
➐ Space agencies like NASA are often criticized as sinkholes for tax dollars, particularly their more ostentatious missions, such as manned spaceflight. Does ESA receive such criticism?
There are countries that say ESA is not effectively using their money. For example, England won’t put money into human spaceflight. They think it’s a waste and you can use that money far better to do robotic missions.
France, more than anyone, recognizes the importance of ESA for industry, pushing it heavily and putting in huge amounts of money — by far the biggest contribution. They are the driver behind Ariane, the European space launcher; without them, it would have never happened. People said Ariane was nonsense and too risky. Why not use the American or Russian launchers? But it’s been a huge success and a strong competitor to the Americans.
➑ Another high-profile European space project is the Galileo system, which would be an equivalent to America’s GPS satellites. The Czech Republic agitated to become Galileo’s headquarters last year. What’s the project’s status?
It’s changed. Originally, the concept was that it’d be a public-private partnership, where industry would make a big investment but in return be able to make money out of it. But because one large consortium combined to bid for the project, there was no competition, and when it found the deal unsatisfactory, it pulled out.
So ESA and the EU — two partners in this project — were faced with a dilemma: Go through another bidding process, scrap the program or finance it themselves. It’s heading toward EU financing. It’s not fully decided; there’s some wheeling and dealing, but by September or October there should be a final announcement.
➒ You’ve said this country has a rich space tradition. How so?
Well, in the 1950s, we were developing rocket launchers at the military academy, but the Russians stopped that. Then we became a partner of the Soviet program. Most of the Interkosmos missions had an important contribution from Czechoslovakia. Until 1990, we had a strong industry with a lot of experts, though it remained rather anonymous. Then everyone turned away from Russia and looked to the West, and the industry disappeared. It wasn’t an activity that came from the people doing it. It came from above. When that went away, the whole thing disintegrated. We’re putting it together again, and at least not starting from scratch.
➓ What needs to change domestically for investment in space to be more viable?
Some of our companies don’t fully appreciate the importance of marketing, networking and working with partners in doing business in the West. I get frustrated seeing Czech companies nervous to work with partners. After all the dirty business that happened during the Wild West capitalism of the 1990s, people are scared to open up. They try to go it alone, but don’t have the resources and often get stuck.
For the space industry, we need our representatives to be more pro-industry oriented. I’d like the CSO to be moved from the Education Ministry to the Industry and Trade Ministry. We need practical conditions that allow us to work. For example, one part of the ESA treaty said all work for them would be tax-free. But the Education Ministry hasn’t yet put this treaty into legislation. They don’t seem to appreciate the importance of VAT for business and the risks we are taking.
Want your top manager to answer our 10 Questions? Send a message to Paul Voosen at pvoosen@praguepost.com


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