UNDER REGISTRATION

  • FERNANDO LÁZARO

    @lazaroelmundo

    Madrid

  • TERESA GUERRERO

    @teresaguerrerof

    Madrid

Updated on Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - 14:42

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  • EU.

    Nadia Calviño assures that she had "approved" at least 10 votes in the Eurogroup

His two missions to space, his training as an engineer and his experience as a manager at the head of the Ministry of Science in Spain and previously at the Office of Flight Operations, in Germany, positioned Pedro Duque as one of the favorites to lead ESA.

However, as this newspaper has learned, the position will go to engineer Josef Aschbacher, current director of ESA's Earth Observation Programs and director of ESRIN, the Observation Center of the

Earth, in Italy. The announcement will be made officially during the Council that the ESA will hold on 16 and 17 December.

It is the third unsuccessful bet of Pedro Sánchez for his ministers to occupy prominent positions in international organizations.

Last July, the economic vice president

Nadia calviño

he stayed

without the presidency

of the Eurogroup.

Despite his experience in the European institutions, the person chosen to succeed the Portuguese Mário Centeno was finally the Irish Paschal Donohoe, nor was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation,

Arancha González Laya,

in July she secured the post of director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a senior position for which she had run.

That Duque was not chosen to head the European Space Agency is Sánchez's third fiasco in less than a year.

Josef Aschbacher, 58, is highly regarded within ESA, which he joined in 1990 after working for a few years as a researcher at the Institute of Meteorology and Geophysics at the University of Innsbruck.

Under his command is the Copernicus Earth Observation Program, one of ESA's main ones.

However, the Austrian was not the only serious rival for Duke.

Christian Hauglie-Hanssen, current director general of the Norwegian Space Agency, was another of the profiles most likely to take over the leadership of ESA.

The term of the current ESA director, the German Johann-Dietrich Wörner, will end in mid-2021.

On August 31, the deadline to submit candidatures for the position ended, to which people born in the 22 countries that are part of the agency can aspire and have international experience in at least one of these areas: political, technical, scientific, However, the European agency does not make public the names of the candidates for the post.

Some like Pedro Duque or Christian Hauglie-Hanssen have publicly reported their candidacy while Josef Aschbacher has not made it public.

Asked a few days ago by this newspaper, Aschbacher kindly declined to confirm that he had submitted his candidacy to head ESA.

The success of the Seville Summit

Despite not having achieved the position, Pedro Duque had a good resume to get him.

A year ago, he scored a goal as host of the ESA Ministerial Council held in Seville Space19 +, which closed with

investment record

by the countries that are part of the agency.

The 57-year-old astronaut from Madrid has traveled to space twice, in 1998 aboard the American spacecraft Discovery, and in 2003 on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

After taking a five-year leave of absence from ESA to found and run the aerospace company Deimos, in 2011 he returned to the agency, where he headed the ESA Flight Operations Office in Germany.

In early 2015, he resumed his full duties as an astronaut and was appointed responsible for the control and review of future ESA projects.

Precisely when his appointment as Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities was announced in June 2018, he was excited about the possibility of carrying out a third space mission.

Duque then became the second astronaut to hold a ministry in the world, after Canadian Marc Garneau.

In January 2020, Sánchez counted on him again for his second term, this time without the portfolio of Universities.

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