Anke collaborated with Fonds Soziokultur as an employee at the German Space Agency at DLR and assessed the Techlab participants’ pitches. The DLR acts as Germany’s national space agency. The German Space Agency within the DLR develops and manages the national space programme and represents the interests of the Federal Republic of Germany in international bodies such as the European Space Agency (ESA).

The main part of my work for the German Space Agency is looking for commercially sustained services and applications that can utilise space data. We’re not focused on any particular sector or topic, we want people to be more aware of the various things space data is used for, which include satellites for earth observation and communication or GNSS navigational systems such as weather forecasting, real-time monitoring, verifying incident reports using satellite imagery, urban planning and monitoring climate change. 
The development of space technology is costly. However, the applications developed demonstrate just how heavily we rely on space-derived data in our daily lives, not just in the context of space research.

We partner with businesses who use space tech for commercial solutions, and who are interested in partnering on projects that could turn a profit. 

By working with organisations such as FSK, we create bigger networks and enter communities we haven’t previously accessed. It’s an exchange of knowledge as we look at what space data could potentially do for them while learning about their work and thinking about what a collaboration might look like.

The Techlab project was a valuable way to seed information with the potential to yield strong results in the future. The teams were highly motivated by doing something meaningful for their communities, even if they weren’t yet focused on profitable opportunities in line with our commercial partners. Although we didn’t take their projects forward this time, it was still a worthwhile exercise and we’d be happy to do again in the future.

We have lots of collaborations and partnerships at different levels. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t but it’s essential to keep trying them – both for the sake of telling people about the infinite possibilities of space data and for us to find new opportunities to use it.