Turksat 6A is Türkiye's highest-value tech project: Vice president

By Gokhan Ergocun

ISTANBUL (AA) - Turksat 6A, Türkiye's first homegrown communications satellite, "is the highest-value technology project produced by our country so far,” Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz said early Tuesday.

"Turksat 6A is a product of our national technology move which we have implemented with a strong political will and the know-how we have acquired through our engineers and defense industry," Yilmaz said during a ceremony in the capital Ankara for the launching of the satellite.

The satellite was launched at 7.30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (2330GMT) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in the US state of Florida by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

Pointing out that satellite technologies, which are used in many fields such as communication, defense, weather forecasts and disaster management, also play a vital role in the security and development of countries, he said that television broadcasts, internet access and phone calls around the world are largely provided by satellites and that high-resolution imaging satellites have the capacity to monitor every point on the globe.

"We consider it extremely important to be independent in such a strategic area with domestic and national technologies," he underlined.

Yilmaz said this level of production will make it possible to export satellites and a lot of equipment and subsystems developed within the scope of satellites and emphasized that the country will make more use of these in the coming processes together with the private sector and exporters and will increase the share of high technology exports in total exports to much higher levels.

Mehmet Fatih Kacir, Türkiye’s industry and technology minister, said Türkiye will establish an umbrella brand with the capacity to compete internationally, gathering the public company’s experience in the satellite development field.

He said the rapid decline in launch costs in the last two decades has opened the door to the fast progress of the global space sector, accelerating space to be the pioneer of new inventions and technologies in different fields, from agriculture to health and communication to information technologies.

He said that during the 6A project, in which Türkiye carried out all stages indigenously, the country achieved a localization rate of more than 80% by domestically producing a total of 84 pieces of equipment of 23 different types such as flight computers, power distribution and regulation units, reaction wheels and the electric propulsion system.

"We verified the suitability of our satellite for space conditions and launch conditions with 396 environmental and functional tests carried out after system integration,” he said.

"We became one of the 11 countries that can produce their own communication satellite with all these capabilities."