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Turkey Sets Out 15-Year Space Programme

Posted on: Tuesday, 28 June 2005, 09:00 CDT

Text of report by Turkish NTV television's NTV Online web site on 24 June

Turkey has been in contact with countries such as China, Ukraine and South Korea for cooperation on its space programme and has set the outline of a 15-year national space programme that will go on to 2020.

Turkey's National Space Programme was taken up at the National Security Council and Defence Industry Executive Committee meetings held consecutively over 21-22 June.

The programme, run jointly by TUBITAK [Turkish Science and Technology Research Association] and the Air Force, identifies year by year what Turkey is going to do in the space field. The budget for the 10-year space project has been set at 1.125bn new Turkish lira.

This year the programme will be put into effect with the establishment of a space research centre. Astronaut training programmes will start in 2008. Pilots to be chosen by the Air Force will be sent abroad for training. All the telescopes in all of Turkey's observatories are due to be replaced by 2010. A national high-altitude aircraft is going to be developed.

The programme's biggest boast is that it will send a Turkish- developed rocket carrying a Turkish-developed satellite to the moon or to Mars in 2014. The programme envisages that specialist manpower will have reached a certain level by 2015 with work on sending an astronaut into space commencing that same year.

With sufficient space technology having been acquired the programme will switch to spaceship design and production in the 2020s. Cooperation with countries such as China, Ukraine and South Korea, whose space programmes have reached a certain stage, will be carried out in all these project areas. Treaties with South Korea and China stating that space is to be used for peaceful purposes have reportedly been signed.

Source: BBC Monitoring European

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