‘Guimarães wants to be the Iberian benchmark for aerospace engineering,’ says the mayor, who reveals that Luís Montenegro will be welcomed to present the national strategy for space.
The presentation of the national space strategy will take place in Guimarães, a municipality led by Social Democrat Ricardo Araújo, representing the starting point on the ambitious path that the mayor wants to follow to make this municipality, home to the Guimarães Space Hub, an Iberian leader in the aerospace field.
Work on the total refurbishment of the Fábrica do Arquinho — where the Guimarães Space Hub will be located, facilities that will host scientists and researchers from the University of Minho and companies wishing to test the developments of the university and CEiiA — is already underway, with opening scheduled for no earlier than 2028.
Created last year, Guimarães Space Hub is currently housed in a room in a municipal building where, as ECO/Local Online was able to confirm, its use is sporadic at best. In fact, the room seems to have served little purpose other than hosting the Guimarães Space Hub launch event.
The situation will change when the new facilities at the former Arquinho Factory become operational, which may not happen before 2028. Until then, the University of Minho will continue to juggle the operational aspects of its aeronautical engineering course, one of the few available in the country.
“We have one of the best aerospace engineering courses [in the country], we are making a very strong investment in the renovation of the Arquinho factory, which will be the headquarters of the Guimarães Space Hub, and therefore we want to build an entire economy around this aerospace area in Guimarães over the next decade. It is a niche, it is a segment, but it works,” says the mayor.
On the academic side, Guimarães Space Hub will focus on ‘research and science for the development and application of skills in the space economy, in areas of sustainability, mobility, AI and defence,’ explains António Vicente, president of the School of Engineering at the University of Minho, which aims to triangulate academic development with application in companies, relying on the local authority for this.
‘For our part, what interests us is to keep this partnership very active, so that we have students who continue to come here, master’s students who develop their theses here,’ says António Vicente.
He wants to replicate in aerospace the partnerships with companies developed by other areas of knowledge taught, noting that both the Portuguese Government and the European Union are in the process of making ‘strong investments’ that will leverage this sector. “We are in a context where there is a buzz in the space sector, which has been growing and will continue to grow over the coming years.”
Alexandre Ferreira da Silva, professor responsible for the Aerospace Engineering course, notes that “we have a PRR from New Space Portugal, which is perhaps the largest PRR running at national level, and it is now important to capitalise on all this to position ourselves [Portugal] as active contributors in the space sector”.
For the country to take on this active role, he says, “we need to create these strategic hubs. One of these is the Guimarães Space Hub”, which is linked to the University of Minho, CEiiA and the local authority. This hub, born in the Fábrica do Arquinho, will contribute to the upstream, which the university professor defines as “everything we might want to launch into space”, as opposed to the downstream, “everything we derive from space, the data we take from space that is used for mobility, territorial management and other similar applications”.
‘Space will grow and we will have the use of space as a European priority,’ he assures, highlighting the ‘opportunities at national level, particularly through international partnerships that have space as one of their relevant vectors’.
Full report at ECO SAPO
