<p>Despite this remarkable milestone, not all Filipinos seem to appreciate the inception of a Space Agency in their own country. They perceive it as a luxurious undertaking for a country that struggles economically. But according to Dr. Rogel Marie Sese, prime advocate of the Philippine Space Policy, in an interview with Inquirer.net, “For every peso the Philippines would spend on a space program, the quantifiable return of investment would be about P2.50,” This echoes a statement from G. Scott Hubbard, professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University and former director of the NASA Ames Research Center, who points out that for every dollar we spend on the space program, the U.S. economy receives about $8 of economic benefit. Philippines used to spend P3.5 billion per year on satellite images acquisition. Yet this hefty sum has long been mitigated through the efforts of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) in developing the country’s own image acquisition satellites. If this similar project is reinforced by a dedicated space-centric government body and developed to address more national concerns, then a Space Agency would appear to be an essential investment after all. As Dr. Joel Marciano, head of Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI), commented during the press conference in the University of the Philippines-Diliman, “A big motivation for us going into space is really about data. And data is a new oil. In the knowledge economy, the currency is data,” He considered lack of data as a form of poverty. As such, Philippines needs to generate a sustainable system of data gathering and there is no better way to implement it than conducting daily Earth observation monitoring. To put this into perspective, some of the practical applications of data generation from Earth observation technology are monitoring crops, disaster management, climate assessment and maritime security.</p>

launch of Diwata-2 video