According to Mr. Nguyen Van Thuat - Deputy Director of the Department of Digital Economy and Digital Society (Ministry of Science and Technology), with new fields such as low-level space economy, if waiting for the complete completion of the legal system to be implemented, development opportunities may be missed. Conversely, if deployed on a large scale without fully assessing risks, it will not ensure management requirements. Therefore, a controlled testing mechanism (sandbox) is built to create space for innovation, and at the same time collect practical data to improve policies.
Also according to the leader of the Department of Digital Economy and Digital Society, Dien Bien is the first locality to approve sandboxes to develop low-level space economy.If successfully implemented, this model will be a reference basis to improve policies and expand new economic sectors nationwide.
Dien Bien was chosen due to its fragmented terrain, high logistics costs, and many remote and isolated areas with difficult access to healthcare, goods and supplies.
The locality also has a large demand for forest management, fire prevention and fighting, rescue and disaster response. Before developing the project, the Ministry of Science and Technology coordinated with the Ministry of National Defense, Dien Bien province and businesses to conduct field surveys, assess infrastructure, development needs and requirements for national defense, security and flight safety.
Test areas, flight corridors and coordination mechanisms are designed to encourage innovation and risk control. The project focuses on 3 groups of applications: Smart agriculture; low-altitude logistics serving remote and isolated areas; resource management and public services such as mapping, forest management, and disaster warning.
According to the plan, the project will carry out about 6,000 test flights, striving for over 99% of flights to be safe and 100% of flight activities to be planned, monitored, traced and reported. A noteworthy point of Dien Bien sandbox is allowing the application of a controlled exemption mechanism for some technical conditions to create conditions for businesses to research, test and improve technology in actual conditions. However, Mr. Nguyen Van Thuat emphasized that all activities are clearly limited in scope, time, area and test objectives, and are subject to the supervision of management agencies, especially for requirements on national defense, security, flight safety and data protection. According to Mr. Nguyen Van Thuat, all test activities will be managed on a unified data architecture. Each flight is planned, monitored and traced.
The project is implemented in four phases, from preparing conditions, organizing trials to summarizing, perfecting policies and expanding effective models.
