On the afternoon of September 24, Chinese and German Space Industries held the first Round-Table in Beijing. Li Guoping, Vice Director General of the Department of System Engineering of China National Space Administration (CNSA), attended the meeting and delivered a speech. The meeting is aimed at promoting the communications between the space industries of China and Germany as well as the space cooperation between the two countries.

First of all, Li Guoping, on behalf of Dr. Ma Xingrui, Administrator of CNSA, warmly welcomed the friends from German space industry to come to Beijing and congratulated on the convening of the meeting. Then he introduced to the participants the achievements that China’s space industry has made in recent years and its role in China’s economic construction and social development.

Li pointed out that the strength of German space industry is generally recognized and the space cooperation between China and Germany has a long history. Enterprises of the two countries have had close contacts and conducted multiple projects of cooperation in space products. He hoped that the space industries of China and Germany can take the meeting as an opportunity to further strengthen cooperation based on their own technological advantages.

Beginning from 1984 and after more than two decades’ development, China-Germany space cooperation has made fruitful achievements. The two parties established the Sino-German Joint Robotics Laboratory in 2008, and multiple cooperation projects including experiments on life science between the two parties were conducted onboard the Shenzhou-8 spaceship in 2011.