Interview by Théo Pirard

The CSL (Centre Spatial de Liège), the university cutting edge technology centre of excellence, world renowned for its space systems, had been looking for a director with experience and new ideas concerning its governance and the restructuring of its activities. This Summer, at the end of a painstaking selection process, and on the recommendation of the CSL’s management committee, the University of Liège’s Board of Directors and Executive Bureau settled its choice on the Liègeois Thierry Chantraine. Here he explains his flight plan for space.

You are discovering what the CSL means as the jewel of Walloon space technology. What are the key elements necessary to regain financial balance?
This financial balance will be possible if we set our sights on new horizons of scientific relevance and technological innovation. To pilot it within not only European but worldwide space technology the CSL can lean on major strong points. I can see four of them as strengths to be privileged.

1. There are the personnel, who under the leadership of Claude Jamar attained an exceptional level of skills, knowledge and mastery of technological domains, but a reorganisation of activities has become necessary within new structures which will interact with each other.

1. It is an institution which has a great reputation on an international level, which offers an image of excellence which other university departments and sections are often unaware of.

1. Its principal strength is being integrated within a dynamic university which is currently taking a new look at itself in order to define new research and development pathways, thanks to a greater opening up to the world and to industry.
2. We are based in Liège, an impassioned city which is getting active in the face of the challenges of the reconversion of its industrial fabric.

What tempted you in terms of driving the CSL forward?
The CSL is anchored within the environment of a university community. This offers it a logic, an autonomy in its thinking processes, in its products and in the manner it functions. Both as a major actor in terms of the region’s economic vitality and as a springboard for top level engineers, researchers and technicians. What particularly attracted me is its research potential, which creates value in the form of technological innovations. The CSL is an actor on a human scale, with 80 to 100 people who know each other, talk to each other and consult one another. And its activities concern a domain of predilection I am passionate about: the space odyssey remains a great adventure for which much remains to be done.

Your first task is a restructuring of the CSL in order to have more effective and more profitable tool. How do you picture it?
A reorganisation is under way. It’s not a question of separating the two fundamental arms. On the one hand there is its department offering tests in conditions of extreme cold and extreme vacuums, thanks to which the CSL remains the privileged partner of the ESA (European Space Agency) for contracts with the manufacturers which are the major contractors. On the other hand there is the optical instrumentation department whose innovation has formed the CSL’s reputation aboard systems in space. They are two of the CSL’s directions which proceed from the same logic and they form an integrated whole within the Centre from the perspective of continuous inventiveness.