GOVSATCOM Precursor responds to the growing need in Europe for secure communications for the benefit of its citizens, in applications for institutional and commercial users.
This was a first step to demonstrate how European space industry can support the EU’s Govsatcom initiative, which aims to pool and share governmental and commercial satellite services to provide secure and guaranteed access to satcom for a wide range of governmental, institutional and commercial applications requiring security and reliability.
Satellite operators and service providers are developing the first GOVSATCOM precursor public–private partnership projects called PACIS:
These projects will develop secure mission control systems and operations centres and demonstrate the benefits of pooling and sharing to users in the field.
The PACIS Projects have been defined as part of a future federation of demonstration projects in the 2017-2020 timeframe. The federation will represent most of European satellite operators and service providers and a wide range of use cases. The ESA Govsatcom Precursor programme will be implemented in synergy with the Govsatcom Pooling & Sharing Demonstrator that is implemented by the European Defence Agency (EDA).