Malta continues to maintain its first place amongst European Union Member States in the Single Market Scoreboard

Joanna Demarco

Orbital Access, a ‘NewSpace’ company, will be opening their headquarters in Malta in a few weeks, launching their services provider and operator, with the hope of pioneering the new aerospace industry and sector in Malta. ‘NewSpace’ refers to the new space market, a change from the old concept of space which included launched vertical rockets, to a private spaceflight industry.

Speaking to The Malta Independent, company director Edmund Arcadian explained that the commercially-run company is a launch services provider and operator, which, in layman’s terms “launches satellites in space” with a reusable rocket launcher.

The satellites are launched on standard airplanes, which will detach from the plane at a certain height and continue into space.

The company is the operator designated for the UK Space Ports at Prestwick and Newquay, and they will be the first space ports in Europe which are able to launch satellites from such locations.

The industry is a €400 billion industry, to which Malta currently does not have exposure to, he said, continuing that the plan is to also encourage other companies within the sector to settle in Malta and make use of the financial services.

Arcadian explained how Malta is also a prime location from which such satellites could be launched into space.

“You are geographically limited to where you can operate space ports from,” he said. “You can’t turn, for example, Frankfurt airport into a spaceport because there are just too many people around there.”

He went on to say that Malta is a prime location. “When you launch, (which happens at a later stage than take-off), what lies beneath is the sea and the Sahara,” he said.

He explained that the demand for satellite is “growing exponentially”. “Everything your mobile phone does, somehow or other, uses a satellite,” he said, going on to list GPS, mobile data and weather reports, amongst others. Malta continues to maintain its first place amongst European Union Member States in the Single Market Scoreboard by retaining the smallest transposition deficit, according to the December 2016 edition of the Single Market Scoreboard, a ranking issued by the European Commission today.

The scoreboard measures the European Union Member States’ efforts and performances in the implementation of the Single Market Law, by recording the transposition deficit adopted at EU level and those in force in the Member States.

The number of overdue directives in Malta is 0.4%, which is far less than the EU average of 1.5%. Malta has thus reached the proposed 0.5% target of transposition deficit.

The Single Market Scoreboard showed that Malta had a sharp decrease in the average delay for transposing pending directives, and is now amongst the top three Member States, with just 3.2 months compared to the EU average of 6.7 months. In addition, Malta recorded a perfect score of 0.0% compliance deficit, which means that Malta is the best performing Member State on this issue. According to the report, “this shows that Malta monitors the timely transposition of the directives quite well”.

The report further reported that Malta has the second lowest number of single market-related cases, with only 5 pending cases compared to the EU average of 24 cases.

Minister for European Affairs and Equality Dr Helena Dalli commended such a positive and excellent result, and said that it was the Maltese Government’s priority to retain its top place amongst the European Union Member States, by having the lowest number of pending directives, and closing existing ones.