This year's Czech Space Week, a festival of space activities organised by the Ministry of Transport together with CzechInvest, the Observatory and Planetarium of the Capital City of Prague, Planetum and other partners, under the auspices of the Czech EU Presidency will go beyond the borders of the Czech Republic and even further. The festival kicked off today, on 28 November, at the Prague Congress Centre with the two-day Space2Business event and will last until Friday, 2 December. The agenda for businesses, investors, start-ups, students, children and other fans of space is really big. It will celebrate the successes of Czech businesses operating in the space industry and introduce innovations that are driving the space sector in the Czech Republic. The event will also address the impact of the war in Ukraine as part of the Czech Copernicus User Forum. The seminar "Defending European Interests in Space" will focus on the increasingly interlinked topics of space and defence. As part of its international overlap, a workshop will also be held to strengthen cooperation with the Indo-Pacific region. The general partner of the event is the Brno-based company TRL Space Systems.
The Ministry of Transport will support the construction of hydrogen filling stations with CZK 300 million from the Operational Programme Transport 2021-2027 (OPD3). It is also launching three other calls for metropolitan areas and agglomerations to support urban transport telematics and the development of urban rail transport infrastructure for a total value of EUR 22.8 billion.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced the results of the competition for new astronauts. The Czech candidate, Captain Ing. Aleš Svoboda, Ph.D., was not missing on the stage in Paris.
A summit meeting of the European Space Agency (ESA) Council at ministerial level was held in Paris in the presence of transport minister Martin Kupka. Delegates from 31 countries discussed the priorities of the European Space Agency for the coming years, the use of space technology in industry and the budget for ESA's science and technology programmes.
The interactive app for motorcyclists, which introduces the risks of real road traffic, received another award; it was ranked third among all national digitalisation projects of public administration in the Czech Republic. The award is announced annually by the Egovernment Magazine. The Road Safety Team has been working on the app for four years together with the Association of Driving Schools of the Czech Republic and other partners. In the development they also used their own experience from teaching motorcyclists.
At the Mobility Education Summit in Abu Dhabi the Ministry of Transport presented Czech projects involving driver education and testing. It presented a new set of test questions for students of driving schools, an interactive application simulating dangerous situations in traffic called “Hazard Perception” and traffic education projects Učme se přežít (“Learn to Survive”) and Start Driving.