Strategic environment and implementation of satellite technology acquisition programs in ASEAN

With the growth of economy in ASEAN countries, their desire to create high value-added jobs or high technology industries are increasing. Such drive, in addition to the clasic motivation of creating national pride and strategy for defense and security, made many of them started to have national space program. Since they are satellite users, they started the program with acquiring satellite production technology. Due to such background, the paper discusses about satellite technology acquisition programs in ASEAN countries, with focus on the program’s strategic environment and implementation. The objective of research is to establish positioning map of satellite technology aqusition program in ASEAN. The method used is decriptive analytics, in which data on the program scale and coverage, technology regulations, and institutional buildings in each countries were sumarized and compared. The study shows that all of the ASEAN countries started their satellite technology acquisition by developing remote sensing satellites. It is found that Singapore and Malaysia are the highest in current satellite technology program scale, and in the future, Vietnam’s program scale will catch up with Indonesian and Thailand’s. For Indonesia, even though it has technology mastering and space agency, but lack of investment made it unable to move beyond micro-satellite program