A six-member delegation of the European Space Agency (ESA) led by Nathalie Tinjod is paying a visit to Croatia this week and Education and Science Minister Blazenka Divjak said on Monday that this would be an opportunity to use this phase for the enhancement of the innovations system in Croatia and for boosting cooperation.

“The upstream and downstream branches of the space sector created over 230,000 jobs in Europe during 2017, valued at EUR 60 billion,” Divjak said at a conference in Zagreb which was attended by the ESA delegation.

She recalled that in February 2018, Croatia and the ESA signed an agreement concerning space cooperation for peaceful purposes.

The cooperation with ESA is implemented through three pillars, and the cooperation agreement paves the way for Croatia’s cooperation with that agency at the first pillar, including the exchange of information at meetings, workshops and training programmes as well as through the implementation of specific data and the ESA assistance in efforts to draw up a national space strategy.

Tinjod said the objectives of the ESA is to develop cooperation with European Union member-states in space research.

The ESA possesses about 80 satellites and 85% of the agency’s budget goes on contracts with the European industry.

The agency’s budget is EUR 5.7 billion for 2019.

The Paris-based ESA is an international organisation consisting of 22 member states: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Slovenia is an associate member. Canada participates in some projects under the cooperation agreement. Bulgaria, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia and Croatia have cooperation agreements with ESA.