Director of the Guiana Space Centre (CSG)
Philippe Lier is a graduate of the SUPELEC electrical engineering school. He joined CNES in 1990 as a dependability engineer in Toulouse. He subsequently worked in the agency’s image quality teams, contributing for many years to the HELIOS I and then HELIOS II military programmes.
Philippe Lier was subsequently the engineer in charge of Jason-1 satellite operations before joining CNES’s project teams as system manager for the PARASOL microsatellite, launched in 2004. From 2005 to 2011, he headed the Image Quality department in charge of readying for the arrival of the Pleiades and CSO satellites. He was then appointed as head of the environment projects department and adviser to the French delegation to ESA’s Programme Board for Earth Observation (PB-EO). In 2016, he was put in charge of CNES’s Scientific Projects sub-directorate and adviser to the French delegation to ESA’s Science Programme Board, before being appointed deputy head of CNES’s Orbital Systems and Applications Directorate.
From April to December 2023, he was head of the Operations and Ground Support Equipment sub-directorate at the Guiana Space Centre.
On 1 December 2023, Philippe Lier was appointed Director of the Guiana Space Centre.
He is also an intern for the 47th session of the IHEDN institute of higher defence studies.