Cabinet has approved the appointment of Étienne Schneider to the advisory board of Space Resources. The news emerged on Monday morning after a meeting at which the government agreed to renew the terms of all current members of the advisory board for a period of two years.

Schneider stepped down from government in February this year and has since joined the board of steel giant ArcelorMittal and Belgian construction and property development group Besix. There are also suggestions that Schneider is positioning himself to become the next director general of the European Space Agency when Jan Wörner leaves the post in summer 2021.

But Schneider was also called in to parliament to answer questions from the budgetary control committee about the spiralling cost of the LUXEOSys military satellite that he signed off when in office. Schneider will sit on the advisory board as an ex gratia member.

The advisory board is led and managed by the Luxembourg Space Agency and is made up of renowned international space experts. They include: former European Space Agency director Jean-Jacques Dordain; the initiator and leader of Japan’s Hayabusa robotic spacecraft project Junichiro Kawaguch; former president of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, Seung Jo Kim; the former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Pete S. Worden; and former chief scientist and project leader of the Strategic Priority Program on Space Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wu Ji.

Apart from Schneider, the Luxembourg representatives are former cabinet minister and guest professor at Luxembourg University Jean-Louis Schiltz, and special envoy of the Luxembourg government for the SpaceResources.lu initiative and former consul general and executive director at the Luxembourg Trade & Investment Office in San Francisco, Georges Schmit.