Origins The
Manila Observatory was established during the
Spanish colonial period in 1865 and was the only formal
meteorological and astronomical research and services institution in the Philippines and remained so until the creation of the
Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) in 1972.
Marcos era Efforts to establish a Philippine space program started as early as the 1960s, when the government built an Earth satellite receiving station.
US President Lyndon Johnson discussed with then-
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in 1966 about the possibility of establishing a joint US–Philippine space program to monitor storms in Asia. If such plans had pushed through it would have been the first time Asians would have gotten involved in space activities. The
Philippine Communications Satellite (Philcomsat) was established within the same decade when the Marcos government built an Earth satellite receiving station. Philcomsat was a founding member of
Intelsat, an international satellite consortium. It also had an exclusive franchise for satellite communication in Southeast Asia, as well as in Korea and Japan. It was also responsible for providing the equipment which enabled people in Asia to watch the
Apollo 11 launch, which took place on July 16, 1969. The wholly government-owned company became a private corporation in 1982. On April 23, 1980, the Philippines became one of the initial 11 signatories to the
Moon Treaty. The
Mabuhay Satellite Corporation (MSC), another consortium, was formed in the same year by
PLDT, which was a former member of PASI. PLDT was the largest member of PASI before its departure from the consortium. MSC was composed of numerous domestic telecommunications and broadcasting companies, along with Indonesia-based Pasifik Satelit Nusantara and China-based Everbright Group. Then, President
Fidel V. Ramos expressed his desire for a Philippine satellite to be in orbit in time for the
APEC Summit to be held in the country in November 1996. MSC launched the country's second satellite,
Agila-2, with the assistance of China. The communications satellite was launched through the
Long March 3B at the
Xichang Satellite Launch Center on August 19, 1997. The satellite was acquired by
Asia Broadcast Satellite in 2011 and was renamed to ABS-3.
PHL-Microsat and Birds-2 programs on display before launch. The DOST initiated the
Philippine Scientific Earth Observation Microsatellite (PHL-Microsat) program to send two microsatellites in 2016 and 2017. The effort is part of the country's disaster risk management program. A receiving station will also be built in the country. The efforts were part of a bigger project, together with seven other Asian countries aside from Japan and the Philippines, to create a network of about 50 microsatellites. The first satellite under the PHL-Microsat program
Diwata-1, the first satellite designed and assembled by Filipinos, with cooperation from
Hokkaido University and
Tohoku University. One of the major goals of the PHL-Microsat program is to boost the progress on the creation of the
Philippine Space Agency. The satellite was deployed from the
International Space Station on April 27, 2016. This satellite was succeeded on October 29, 2018, by
Diwata-2, which was launched directly into orbit from the
Tanegashima Space Center in Japan.The first nanosatellite under the Birds-2 program,
Maya-1 was also deployed from the ISS in the Japanese
Kibo module along with two other satellites from Bhutan and Malaysia on August 10, 2018.
Creation of the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) Despite these advancements, the country's space program still faced two primary challenges: insufficient funding and the lack of a centralized space agency. In the absence of a formal space agency, the DOST funded the National Space Development Program to set up the foundations of a future space agency. In late January 2019, the Department of Science and Technology has said that the Philippines is already capable of founding its own space agency with a pending bill already passed in the House of Representatives and pending counterpart legislation already pending in the Senate. By this time since 2010, the science department has already spent (or $144 million) for space research and development, aided 5,500 scholars, trained more than 1,000 space science experts, and established 25 facilities in various parts of the Philippines. The Philippine Space Agency was established when the "
Philippine Space Act" (Republic Act 11363) was signed into law by Pres. Duterte on 8 August 2019. The first head of Philippine Space Agency,
Joel Marciano Jr. was appointed on December 5, 2019, by President Duterte. The agency is currently focused on developing additional micro and nano-satellites and has not discounted developing
rocket launch capability in the long term. == List of Philippine satellites ==