On the need of new educational curricula in the field of space technologies and their applications

The need of dedicated educational curricula in the field of space technologies and their applications was identified as a gap in the official European offer already in 2013 when the Virtual GMES Academy concept was launched with the Salzburg protocol in the framework of EU4Regions project. Since then, the goal to fill this educational gap (no official academic courses are presently offered covering all the aspects of Space Technologies from the mission design up to the applications developments) has been included, as a pillar, in the European Copernicus-uptake strategy, After the start of the European network of Copernicus Academies, the EO4GEO project took the initiative to design the Body of Knowledge (BoK) to be at the base of new specific educational curricula and well identified skills in the field. The present status of development of Bok, its relevance even for non-EU and particularly for developing countries, is here discussed and presented....