Companies from France, Canada, India, South Korea and Russia applied last Friday to produce the first Chilean satellite and submitted their projects to the Chilean Defence Minister.

Although nine internacional companies were pre-qualified, one from Germany and Ukraine finally decide to no participate. U.S. firms were not interested in this space initiative.

Meanwhile, the seven projects now are in hand of the Chilean Airforce and will be sized up by military and civil personnel.

On april 9 of  2007, and after nine months of preparation, the Chilean satellite project work team, lead by Aviation Subsecretary, Raul Vergara, sent the bases of the bidding to the 25 world main spatial companies to make a satellite system to Chile.

The satellite Project aims to study natural resources, and the behaviour of oceans, snow, rivers and forest with a periodicity of two or three days.

Resides, the objectives of the Defence Ministry are to obtain a satellite with a lifetime of five years and learn the technology of fabrication to integrate the industry, universities and local cientific community to this process.

At the end of Ricardo Lagos’ government, the project named “Satellite System to the observation of the earth”, was granted to the French firm EADS. The pre-agreement was signed on march 3 of 2007, in Michelle Bachelet’s government, and implicated a public investment of 45 million dollars.

However, in that time some politicians criticize the transparency of the process, specially from the Defence Committee of the Deputy chamber, lead by Patricio Hales, one of them most critic alon with Jorge Burgos.

The mains objection aims to the quickness to define the company in charge and to no consider several companies that also applied.

Then President Bachelet decided to cancel the process that she inherited from the previous administration and perform a new international bid.

This project is the second Chilean effort to have own technology in space matters, after the launching of the FASat-Alfa y FASat-Bravo by the Air Force in the 90’s.

About this new process the deputy Alejandro Hales said he is satisfied because its transparency and are more companies is the current bid. Nonetheless he reproved that Defence Ministry does not public the process to receive the seven offers.