Space industry in the Philippines

Philippine Space Agency

Quezon City, Philippines government

The Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) is the national space agency of the Philippines defined by the Philippine Space Act signed into law on August 8, 2019, by President Rodrigo Duterte. PhilSA focuses on six areas: national security and development, hazard management and climate studies, space R&D, space industry capacity building, space education and awareness, and international cooperation. A permanent headquarters is being developed in New Clark City, Capas, Tarlac on a hectare of land under a 50-year lease.

Orbits Corp is a Philippine satellite services company that in 2022 ordered a dedicated geostationary broadband satellite from U.S. small-GEO builder Astranis, part of Astranis's "Block 2" MicroGEO line. The spacecraft, named Agila, launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on December 29, 2024, and is intended to deliver Ku-band high-throughput internet capacity to underserved areas of the Philippines, with Astranis and Orbits Corp citing a goal of connecting up to roughly 2 million Filipinos. Orbits Corp contracted the satellite's capacity to Philippine telecom provider HTechCorp for last-mile service delivery, making it one of the country's few Philippine-owned satellite capacity providers rather than a reseller of foreign fleet capacity.

STAMINA4Space (Space Technology and Applications Mastery, Innovation and Advancement) is a Philippine government-funded satellite research and development program, funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and jointly implemented by the DOST-Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI) and the University of the Philippines Diliman. It grew out of the Philippine Scientific Earth Observation Microsatellite (PHL-Microsat) Program, a three-year collaboration with Japan's Tohoku University and Hokkaido University that began in December 2014. A team of nine Filipino engineers, working alongside Japanese scientists, built Diwata-1, a 50-kilogram Earth-observation microsatellite and the first satellite designed and built by Filipino engineers; it launched on an Atlas V rocket in March 2016, was deployed from the International Space Station in April 2016, and operated until April 2020, returning more than 17,000 images used for disaster, vegetation and ocean-color monitoring. The program went on to build Diwata-2 and a series of CubeSats, Maya-1 through Maya-6, with Maya-5 and Maya-6 deployed in July 2023 and Maya-3/4 completing their missions in 2022. STAMINA4Space collaborates closely with the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA, established 2019) on educational outreach and satellite-development work, though it remains a distinct DOST-ASTI/UP Diliman initiative rather than part of PhilSA itself. The program continues training Filipino engineers in spacecraft design, integration and operations and is the country's principal source of domestically built orbital flight hardware.