Funding Opportunity According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), at the end of 2020, 82.4 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, or events seriously disturbing public order, resulting in multiple humanitarian crises. ESA is currently in discussions with leading humanitarian organisations including the International […]Read More
Commissioned by the Netherlands Space Office, dotSPACE has launched the Open Calls initiative to support the Dutch space sector in finding relevant Horizon Europe and other European funding calls. This initiative will be managed by Groundstation under the name OpenCalls.Space. The project includes a portal with all relevant calls, including factsheets, and a series of information webinars. dotSPACE offers support to organisations looking to find suitable consortium partners.
Open Calls Objectives
One of the objectives of the OpenCalls.Space initiative is to make the Dutch space sector more actively aware of opportunities and enable Dutch organisations to showcase, apply and share their knowledge in European consortia. This will strengthen both the Dutch and the European space industry simultaneously.
Funding calls for the space sector
The funding calls that will be collected in the portal include the new Horizon Europe calls, but also calls from other sources, like the European Development Fund (EDF) and Digital Europe. Initially, the calls in the portal cover potential space applications in sectors like health, civil security, climate, energy, mobility, and bio-economy, with more sectors being added over time.
The new open calls portal offers great opportunities for a wide variety of space organisations, including those specialising in space, Earth observation, remote sensing, and satellite navigation technology and applications.
Funding Webinars
In 2021 and 2022 Groundstation and NSO host a series of webinars on this topic, highlighting funding opportunities with the Horizon Europe and other European funding programmes. These webinars aim to bring Dutch and European space and non-space companies together in consortia to write successful proposals for these projects.
Earlier this month Dutch science and technology support organisation Rathenau Instituut published an extensive study to the position of Dutch research, education and industry in the EU Horizon 2020 programme. This article highlights some of the key findings of this study. You can find the full study here (in Dutch). The Netherlands and Horizon 2020 […]Read More
The European Commission has opened a call for expression of interest for In Orbit Demonstration/Validation (IOD/IOV) Experiments. This call opened on 28 March 2022 and will remain open until the submission deadline on 31 May 2022. Background of this Call One of the main objectives of the Space strategy for Europe is to foster a […]Read More
The Copernicus programme has opened a call for tender for rapid mapping solutions under its Emergency Management Service (EMS) Floods are among the costliest natural disasters in Europe and in the world, and represent around 30% of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) Rapid Mapping activations. The Rapid Mapping service delivers post-event crisis information in […]Read More
The Dutch AI and Earth observation sectors show great overlap, as shown by the recently published Dutch AI Landscape and Netherlands Space Industry maps. At the recent virtual Swedish Innovation Days, the updated version of the European AI (Artificial Intelligence) landscape was presented. The first version of the landscape was launched at the end of […]Read More
The startup and SME landscape in the space industry has grown significantly, in both value and scale, in recent years, with increasing opportunities for both funding and technical support. To keep the value chain sustainable and on track to continue healthy growth, startups and SMEs must leverage the global space industry network in order to […]Read More
The first EUSPA Horizon Europe calls are open for submissions with a deadline of 16 February 2022, with an overall budget of 32.6 million euro for the development of innovative space downstream applications. Horizon Europe Space Calls Horizon Europe is the EU programme to stimulate the market and support the creation of commercial solutions for the EU space […]Read More
The first Horizon Europe call managed by the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) is now open for submissions. With an overall budget of 32.6 million EUR, the call aims at developing innovative downstream applications that leverage data from the EU Space Programme, namely Galileo, EGNOS, and Copernicus. The deadline for applications is […]Read More
Last week dotSpace, together with Netherlands Space Office NSO organised a successful networking webinar, connecting the Dutch and European space sector in finding opportunities to collaborate under the Horizon Europe programme. In this article we present the organisations that pitched in this session, looking for potential consortium partners. This networking session was the last in […]Read More
Join the webinar on opportunities in Horizon Europe for Govsatcom, Quantum Technologies and AI, organised with the Netherlands Space Office (NSO), this Monday 25 October 2021! Funding calls for the space sector In the webinar we will highlight a selection of Horizon Europe calls that will benefit from Govsatcom, Quantum Technologies and Artificial Intelligence data […]Read More



















