Mexico does not have the legal framework to attract aerospace investments

MEXICO - Elon Musk's company SpaceX has set its sights on Tamaulipas to install a space launch base. This is no coincidence. Mexico is one of the few countries with a privileged location for this type of activities, even better than Florida. Thanks to this, Musk has not been the only actor interested in the country for these purposes.

The South Korean government has also shown interest in investing in a take-off platform and even in developing technology for this industry.

But none of the proposals have been able to materialize for a simple reason: Mexico does not have the legal framework to attract this type of investment.

Bill Nelson, head of NASA, has emphasized the urgency for Mexico to promote the legal framework for the space sector.

"In his visit to the country last year, Nelson said that the United States has several projects in this area, but cannot entrust them to just any nation, but to Mexico. That is why he urged the senators to regularize the space sector in order to develop technology and launch bases of their own”, revealed Roberto Briano, former deputy of the Morena party in the LXV Legislature.

Since 2022, space industry specialists have been pushing the Constitutional Reform project called 'Activities of outer space, the moon and other celestial bodies' which seeks to modify articles 28 and 73 of the Constitution so that in the first case, the space sector is considered as a strategic and priority activity of the State, while with the change of the second article, the Congress will determine the regulatory framework with which the country and private companies will operate in the sector.

The space reform bill was approved by the Chamber of Deputies in April last year, but the political situation of the country's presidential elections slowed down its discussion in the Senate. However, the approval of the reform has become indispensable for the realization of one of the great bets of Claudia Sheinbaum: to boost the space industry.

Within the Plan Mexico, she has considered the sector as a key to boost the country's economy, through its own designs and the national manufacture of components for a constellation of observation satellites and engines. The goal is to increase the local content of this industry by 10% for export.

According to the World Economic Forum, the space sector is one of the most dynamic industries today. The sector's economy is expected to reach US$1.8 trillion by 2035. Thanks to the advancement of space technologies.

Roberto Briano, who is also an aerospace engineer, acknowledged that Mexico faces a historical delay in this industry, but the political and commercial juncture of boosting the national, forces the country to become a developer of this type of technology.

The approval of the space reform would provide the government with the missing tools to attract foreign investment, but above all, it would lay the foundations for the country to promote its own designs and technologies in this sector.

“Mexico needs to get into this dynamic because we have the number one consumer in space activities, the United States. But it also needs to gradually become technologically sovereign so that it no longer depends so much on other countries,” said Briano.

Briano assures that by making the space industry a priority in the country, the State is given the opportunity to invest in this type of infrastructure, but also to the private sector, generating a favorable environment for the promotion of its own space designs and infrastructure, and above all to protect national patents.

So far, Mexico has positioned itself as a manufacturing nation in the sector. For example, 20 of the components for Starlink constellation satellites, such as the combustion chambers of SpaceX's Raptor engines, are manufactured in Monterrey and Chihuahua, but none of them bear the 'Made in Mexico' seal.