Grottaglie is the location chosen for the construction of a spaceport inside the airport. Criptaliae Spaceport will be the name of the facility in Southern Italy.
The aerospace sector is ready to provide an offer of innovative services for requests of various types, public and private. The novelty will involve the Grottaglie airport, inside which the spaceport entitled “Criptaliae Spaceport”, from the ancient name of the city, will rise.
The memorandum of understanding affects some public entities, including ENAC, Aeroporti di Puglia, ENAV and the Military Aviation Authority, which will be users of aerospace services. The new Grottaglie facility will bring great prestige to Southern Italy, as stated by ENAC president Pierluigi Di Palma:
A unique excellence in Europe rises in the heart of the South of Italy. The project that we are launching today together with the Apulia Airports and its President Antonio Vasile has the ambition to ferry the aerospace ecosystem towards the near future. Space and aerospace are two fundamental and strategic sectors for the country’s interest and the core of the Criptaliae Spaceport project has as its primary objective the promotion of the “New Space Economy” which will allow the development of an integrated technological hub, with important employment and economic implications . The future is already here and we are ready to take up the challenge by also stimulating the establishment of innovative start-up companies: because not only the concepts and ideas of advanced air mobility and aerospace but also their realizations,
In Puglia and the South we have the right skills to ensure that the aerospace sector is a tool for consolidating the regional development system. I am thinking of the economic impact of the Grottaglie spaceport, which I am sure will have repercussions not only on the Apulian territory, but also on the national one. We at Aeroporti di Puglia have taken up the challenge, we have deployed all our skills to win it and to offer the community the benefits that will derive from it.
Antonio Maria Vasile, president of Aeroporti di Puglia
- Space, signed protocol agreement for “spaceport” in Grottaglie (askanews.it)