Britain’s space race is far from over

What is it about the Brits and raining on their own parade? Within hours of the news that Britain’s first rocket launch into orbit from Spaceport Cornwall had failed, out came the arm-chair sceptics suggesting the region should stick to pasties and ice-cream rather than rockets. Others claimed we are too late for the space race, that we don’t have the firepower or the know-how or the military complex to compete with the US, Russian or Chinese space programmes and that we would be better off focusing on areas we know best, like AI and life sciences. 

Some critics dismissed the Virgin rocket as a phallic distraction left over from the boosterism of the Boris Johnson era. (It was Johnson who launched the National Space Strategy, hoping to turn Global Britain into Galactic Britain.) Others criticised Virgin’s Start Me Up mission as another Sir Richard Branson dud, powered more by Virgin hype than rocket fuel. 

What baloney. The failure of Virgin Orbit’s Cosmic Girl is just a blip, a pretty normal flop in the race ahead to transform the country’s already dynamic space sector into a more thriving industry.  

While Cosmic Girl may have failed getting the satellites whizzing into orbit, what the project did show was that Spaceport Cornwall can handle horizontal launches. Not only are more rocket launches planned for later this year at spaceports around the country but the recent hiccup has upped the ante as to who will be the first to go into orbit. Will it be Sir Richard’s Virgin Orbit having another go from Cornwall or Lockheed Martin’s vertical launch from the Outer Shetland Islands?

Rather than dull appetites, Cosmic Girl’s flop has galvanised those working on the various spaceports being developed or under construction at Sutherland in Scotland, Uist in the Shetlands and another in Snowdonia in Wales to be the first to lift-off. 

And the UK is still a great place from which to launch: the country’s relatively high latitude means satellites go north over the Atlantic without disturbing people or settlements on the ground. Being so far north also means it’s the perfect place for sending satellites into polar and Sun-synchronous orbits, which go over the north and south poles: particularly useful for satellites that monitor the earth and provide telecommunications.

Having launch pads in the UK – the only European country to do so – is also good news for the world’s space industry: Cosmic Girl carried the first Omani satellite. At present, European space companies ship their satellites to the US and other locations, so having a spaceport so close by is handy. 

That means satellite operators will find it easier to book flights on the smaller UK rocket launches rather than having to wait for space on the bigger ones such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 in the US for which there is a long waiting list. Russia’s war with Ukraine has upped demand even more so from the West as Russian launch capabilities are now out of bounds. 

Space is potentially big bucks. The UK’s Space Agency – now headed by former science minister Lord Willetts – reckons the country’s launch services could be worth £3.8 billion to the economy over the next decade and create hundreds more jobs. Around 150 new jobs are to be created at Spaceport Cornwall and the Centre for Space Technologies alone. 

Behind the launch services is a bigger but fragmented space sector which already employs around 47,000 people and is worth around £16.4 billion per year – although half of that is accounted for by Sky subscribers. It’s estimated that satellites underpin £360 billion per year of wider economic activity.

Yet while the UK sector is growing, it is not increasing its share of the global space economy; one which is projected to grow from an estimated £270 billion in 2019 to £490 billion by 2030. But if handled correctly, some estimate the UK’s share could be worth £40 billion by the end of the decade. 

Where the armchair critics may have a point is that considering the astonishing high quality – and long history – of brilliant academic research in aerospace, we should be further ahead than we are. It was Frank Whittle who first developed the turbojet in the 1930s, and the UK went on to lead the world in the 1950s in high-speed propulsion and jet engines, and of course Concorde. The first official British space programme began in 1952. In 1959 the first satellite programme was started with the Ariel series of British satellites, built in the US and the UK and launched using American rockets up until the late 1970s. Then space exploration fizzled out, leaving a gap of about 40 years during which innovation continued but commercialisation didn’t follow.

So what went wrong? Looking back, George Freeman, minister for sciences, dates the gap to the 1970s which were marked by crippling strikes and political upheaval. “Then came Thatcher in the 1980s,” Freeman says, speaking to Reaction. “Which was another painful period, with the old industries dying out, and the emphasis moving to the City and services, an emphasis which was continued by Blair. Innovation and making things of high-value were forgotten.”

He adds: “If Harold Wilson – who warned his audience in 1963 that if the country was to prosper, a ‘new Britain’ would need to be forged in the ‘white heat’ of a scientific revolution – were to come back now, he would be deeply disappointed. We have dropped a couple of balls along the way.”

These are the balls that Freeman, along with a dedicated group of space scientists and entrepreneurs, are now picking up on and hoping to run with. He says: “We have huge potential in the UK to build a thriving space industry but first we need to pull together several levers: government support, attracting private funding, more overseas investment in R&D and helping young companies to scale-up.

“The life sciences has AstraZeneca and GSK to support the industry, to help commercialise ideas. The space sector needs to create similar companies.”  

We already excel in making satellites as well as designing them: Glasgow builds more satellites than anywhere outside the United States and the technology really is world-beating – and this is not another case of British exceptionalism. Unfortunately the UK’s biggest satellite maker, Inmarsat, has just been taken over by the US Viasat although the deal is still being scrutinised by regulators.

There’s no doubt we have the academic talent as well as the research which has led to cutting-edge engineering such as the Cardiff-based start-up Space Forge. The firm is creating the world’s first returnable and reusable satellite platform to allow humanity to harness the power of microgravity and transform manufacturing forever. Sadly, one of its satellites, ForgeStar-O, was among the nine payloads which crashed and burned last week during the Virgin Start Me Up mission. Others leading the field in rocket science are Reaction Engines, based at Oxford’s Culham Science Centre, working on new generation of advanced propulsion engines and hypersonic flight. 

We certainly have the brains. If you visit the Harwell Science and Innovation campus in Oxford – as I have done  – you will also see the most extraordinary work being done on what goes into those satellites: companies like Kayser Space work on using microgravity platforms in space to stimulate drug discovery while Rezatec, a geospatial data analytics company, uses space data to track forest lifecycles, predict burst water mains, and maximise crop potential. Another, siHealth, reads data from space to control people’s exposure to the sun. Astonishing stuff.

Known as the UK’s space gateway, Harwell is home to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories – where they test satellites in giant cocktail shakers – which has been involved in more than 210 space missions, the European Space Agency, the Satellite Applications Catapult and Astroscale, which deals with space junk – a real problem. As well as the big beasts of aerospace such as Lockheed Martin, Thales and Airbus there are dozens of younger companies such as Oxford Space Systems which have gone from start-ups to become serious players in hardware for satellites. 

Harwell has more than 100 space organisations with around 1400 researchers and scientists working there. It’s really worth a visit – especially to the Diamond Light Source, the UK’s only synchrotron science facility which works like a giant microscope, using the power of electrons to produce such a bright light that scientists can use to study anything from fossils to jet engines to viruses and vaccines – and dust from millions of miles away in outer space.  

Freeman has earmarked five priorities to bring together the jigsaw pieces to boost the sector, helping turn the recent National Space Strategy into a strategy rather than a prospectus. He adds: “The strength of our space science & technology sector has made us a Formula 1 ‘pit lane’ of SpaceTech. But without a car in the race, launching rockets has historically been dominated by the US, Russia, China (& France via ESA).”

His priorities are to make sure future rocket launches work, to help develop a deeper insurance market for satellites through Lloyds of London, work even closer with the European Space Agency in which British astronauts are involved and by using the government’s golden share in OneWeb to ensure the manufacturing and launch of OneWeb satellites is here in the UK. 

His fifth priority is for the sector to work together with a stronger voice through the new Space Council set up by Johnson wearing his galactic hat but which is not yet operational. It’s hoped that Star Trek fan, Rishi Sunak – who gets the need for more joined up thinking and more importantly, the need for greater government support with a well-thought through industrial strategy – will chair the council.  

Only last week, in a landmark speech entitled Science Superpower: the UK’s Global Science Strategy beyond Horizon Europe for the Onward think tank, Freeman made the point that you don’t get world class science on a shoestring, that it needs proper funding and backing. He went further: “The last decade has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that we need a more resilient, sustainable, model of economic growth.” Which is why building on our strengths in scientific innovation – and space – is a no-brainer. 

The message is getting through. Freeman’s department recently won more funding from the Treasury for the science portfolio, rising from £15 billion to £20 billion a year. (Compare that to China which is spending $240 billion this year on scientific research and the US which, together with the military, plans on a $300 billion budget.) 

Some £3.5 billion of the UK’s budget will go to space. Another £3.5 billion of funding comes from the Ministry of Defence, which is closely involved with the space programme as one of the biggest users of data from satellites for military intelligence, from surveillance to navigation. 

As Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, said recently when setting out the recent Defence Space Strategy: Operationalising the Space Domain, being bolder in space to improve information from Five Eyes to NATO is essential for all aspects of national security. 

Yet more needs to be done for the sector to fly faster. Susannah Streeter, analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, suggests that government – and Whitehall – needs to give more clarity about how these big ambitions are to be achieved. Better resourcing of the Civil Aviation Authority to speed up the awarding of licences for future launches, she says, would be a first step. 

Another would be the appointment of a UK Chief of the Space Force to oversee future missions, a new role which the US has recently created. It’s not a bad idea: big leaps forward are often taken only when you have the right leader championing the cause and pulling together the strings. Step forward Major Tim Peake, the first British astronaut who made it to the International Space Station and a British Army Air Corps officer to boot. Your country needs you.

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