The Legislative Yuan yesterday passed a bill to transform the National Space Organization (NSPO) into the National Space Center, which is to be a nondepartmental public body overseen by the Ministry of Science and Technology.
The National Space Center Establishment Act (國家太空中心設置條例) now awaits President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) signature.
The NSPO’s reorganization into a nondepartmental public body is mandated by the Space Development Act (太空發展法), which took effect in January, the ministry said in a statement.
An independent, dedicated space agency would improve the nation’s space operations and development of space technologies, it said.
The change would add more responsibilities to the agency’s original mission, including cultivating talent in space-related fields and devising policies to boost the competitiveness of the nation’s space industry, the ministry said.
The new roles would be better accomplished by a nondepartmental public body, especially with regard to resource integration, it said.
The space center would be controlled by the ministry, and later by the Council of Science and Technology following the ministry’s planned transformation.
It is to oversee the creation and execution of national space technology programs; the development, transfer and commercialization of space technologies; and facilitate international space cooperation and exchanges, among other tasks, the ministry said.
The center is to be overseen by a board of trustees with 11 to 15 members, three to five supervisors and a chairperson, which are unpaid positions.
A director is to be nominated by the chairman and confirmed by the board.
As nondepartmental public bodies are not governed by the Government Procurement Act (政府採購法), lawmakers separately passed resolutions for the space agency to create rules to prevent corruption.
These include procedures for procurement and rules to prevent conflicts of interest to be submitted to the ministry in three months and five months after the promulgation of the establishment act.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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