Colonel Pedro Miguel da Silva Costa, an Electrical Engineer, was born in 1977 in Sever do Vouga. He joined the Air Force Academy in 1995 and was promoted to his current rank on 7 February 2024.
He holds a degree in Military and Aeronautical Sciences from the Air Force Academy, specialising in Electrical Engineering, and has completed the standard career training courses, as well as the Joint Staff Course (CEMC). He holds a Master’s degree in Military Sciences, Security and Defence from the Military University Institute (IUM).
Throughout his career, he served in the Directorate of Electrical Engineering, the Air Force Infrastructure Directorate and the IUM. As a lecturer at the IUM, he taught on the Crisis and Armed Conflicts course.
From June 2021 to August 2024, he was seconded to the Defence Department of the Portuguese Space Agency, where he served as a space specialist on behalf of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, and was responsible for areas such as Space Surveillance and Tracking, Space Traffic Management and the Santa Maria Space Cluster. During his time at the Portuguese Space Agency, he served as the national representative to the European Union’s External Action Service for the implementation of the European Union’s Space Strategy in the field of security and defence, and participated as an expert in the EU Observatory of Critical Technologies (OCT).
He is currently posted to the Air Force Air Command as Head of the Air Force Space Operations Centre. He also holds the position of National Contact Point for Innovation and Development – Space in Defence at the European Defence Agency.
He is a PhD candidate in International Relations (specialising in the History and Theory of International Relations) at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the New University of Lisbon, with a thesis entitled ‘Space Power and International Relations: the European Union and the integration of space technology into its security and defence domain’.
He is Director of the research project “Space Power: a new structuring domain of power”, currently being carried out by the IUM Research Centre, and serves as principal investigator on the research project “Aerospace Power: a contribution to sovereignty, jurisdiction, security and development in the Portuguese Atlantic”.
In addition to the roles mentioned above, he is the coordinator of the postgraduate programme “Space in Defence and National Security” currently being developed by the Air Force Academy.
