UK space sector caught between opportunity and limitation

• The UK government believes space sector is a key driver for economic growth
• International collaboration is vital for progress
• Strong R&D capabilities are yet to be fully commercialised

LONDON, UK – Connected Britain 2025  – The UK space sector is caught between opportunity and limitation, according to experts speaking at the Connected Britain event in London this week.

While the government is showing an appetite to grow the UK’s space activities to fuel stuttering economic growth, experts warn that many elements of the space industry mandate international collaboration.

However, the experts agreed that improving per-bit economics and the number of use cases would lead to increasing deployment.

Ambitions are high: The UK Space Agency commissioned a study two years ago that outlined a £2.7bn UK opportunity by 2031 for what it called ‘sustainable space infrastructure’, and the government is standing by those figures.

Chris Bryant, then Space Minister (and now a Minister of State at the Department for Business and Trade) said in a UK government statement last month: “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see the importance of space to the British economy. This is a sector that pulls investment into the UK and supports tens of thousands of skilled jobs right across the country, while nearly a fifth of our GDP is dependent on satellites.” 

The UK government has already revealed that it will roll the UK Space Agency into the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) by next April, though this initiative is mainly driven by scrutiny on public spending and a focus on accountability, as well as an attempt to align the teams that drive the space sector forward.

Paul Febvre, professor of space systems at Cranfield University, told delegates at Connected Britain: “The UK has a really strong heritage that could be used in building new systems,” noting that the university is adding satellite content into “many of its courses” to ensure there is a skills pipeline for the future.

Richard Thomason, senior policy advisor for satellite communications at DSIT, told delegates at the event that the UK’s satellite R&D capabilities were “very strong”, but warned that the UK could not function alone in what he described as a “very costly, very challenging” industry, adding that progress could be stunted by the government’s review of public spending. 

Thomason said that the European Space Agency is the UK’s “main vector” for collaboration and that progress on issues like space debris and spectrum must be global by nature.

Febvre confirmed the scale of expenditure, saying that the cost of global satellite connectivity had risen from around £3bn to between £20bn and £50bn during his nearly 30 years working in the industry but referred to a “dramatic” reduction in cost per bit.

Several speakers discussed use cases based on connecting citizens using bus and rail transport, and rural internet connectivity. BT is already working with OneWeb, now part of Eutelsat, to provide internet connectivity in remote areas, while Vodafone Group is working with AST SpaceMobile to enable mobile data connectivity from satellites to smartphones across all of Europe.  

Philippa Davies, mission lead for connected earth at the Satellite Applications Catapult – an organisation working at arms length from the government to grow the satellite sector – acknowledged that a lot of companies in the space sector are quite small in terms of the number of employees, and that they need help to successfully commercialise their products and services. Davies said that there are many tangible use cases for satellites, and that the UK has “a lot of capability” and “world-leading connectivity”.

Cranfield University’s Febvre added that the innovation ecosystem now “needs to scale”.

– Richard Thurston, contributing editor, TelecomTV