Throughout 2023, the FBRK editorial team repeatedly wrote about JSC «NC «Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary», which, despite large-scale state funding, concludes single-source contracts under the pretext of having its own satellites, and continues to cause concern regarding the inefficiency of its operations and the lack of transparency of its activities.
Questions arise, first and foremost, due to the national company's repeated contradictory statements, which sow doubt among the public and state bodies. Nevertheless, JSC «NC «Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary» loudly proclaims its «achievements» in the space industry.
The website of the «Space Monitoring» project, developed by «KGS», states that under the budget programme, satellite imagery is provided to state bodies and organisations free of charge. The national company has been claiming this since 2015.
Meanwhile, it is known that back in 2017, the Aerospace Committee conducted a state audit and identified non-compliance with procurement legislation requirements, specifically concerning services for providing satellite imagery to state bodies and organisations. The total value of violations at that time amounted to 694.9 million tenge.
For 2023-2024, NC «Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary» has more than 30 contracts with state bodies worth over 1.4 billion tenge. We have written several times about the «KGS» deal with the Land Resources Management Committee (LRMC), under which satellite imagery purchased from the Chinese company Ti-Tech Development Limited was provided.
«KGS» itself has not denied this purchase of satellite imagery, explaining it by the need, under the contract, to provide very high spatial resolution satellite imagery in the shortest possible time, for which there are no analogues in Kazakhstan.
The national company also does not hide the fact that it uses the services of «Maxar Intelligence Inc.», «Planet Labs» and «NASA», as evidenced by procurement contracts and publications from «KGS» itself on social networks. Particular attention is drawn to the practice of «Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary» of reselling open space data as «geoservices».
An example of such activity is the so-called fire monitoring service, which actually uses free accessible data from satellites such as «Terra Modis», «Aqua Modis» and «Suomi NPP», which calls into question the uniqueness and value of the services offered.
Such contradictions between stated goals and actual practice highlight the need to review the strategy and operations of «Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary», and also raise questions about the cost-effectiveness of using state funds.
The effectiveness of the specialised «geoservices» that JSC «NC «Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary» uses for preventing and combating natural disasters also remains in question. A dangerous spring-summer season lies ahead, which is fraught with further floods and forest fires, and everyone knows the consequences of emergencies if they are not dealt with in time.
The «Space Monitoring» project states that law enforcement agencies use Earth remote sensing (ERS) data for operational decision-making in emergency situations. However, there are known cases when, during fires, «KGS» provided the Ministry of Emergency Situations with incorrect satellite data.
As an example, we can recall the fire on the territory of the «Semey Ormany» reserve, which destroyed more than 60,000 hectares, with 15 people killed. In the Kostanay region, a forest fire covered about 48,000 hectares. Overall, over the last 5 years in Kazakhstan, approximately 3,000 forest fires have been recorded, affecting a total area of 610,000 hectares.
It was also not possible to prevent flooding in a timely manner. In 2020, in the Turkestan region, over 1,000 homes and social facilities were damaged, and over 30,000 people were evacuated. In 2022, in the Aktobe, Pavlodar, Karaganda regions and WKO, 185 residential houses and 78 dacha houses were submerged, and more than 1,000 people were evacuated.
For your information, «Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary», within the framework of the budget programme, performs more than 40 specialised services; we have provided only a few of them as examples. In previous years, representatives of the Aerospace Committee repeatedly stated that having raw satellite data is not enough; it must also be properly analysed.
But in that case, given the amount of funds invested in the development of space monitoring, it is high time to acquire highly qualified specialists and learn to quickly analyse data. This is something we, unfortunately, still do not observe today.
It would also be a good idea to audit how much data «KGS» provides to users, and how much of it proves useful to akimats and ministries. There is information that the ERS data provided by the national company is, for the most part, low in information content, and therefore useless.
Given all these circumstances, the need to revise the approaches and working methods of «Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary» in the field of space monitoring becomes obvious, in order to ensure real benefits for preventing and minimising the consequences of natural disasters.
To be continued …