Engineering news
The UK’s 'buoyant' satellite and space sector is at risk of being held back by a lack of flight opportunities, the Commons Science and Technology Committee has warned.
The MPs have recommended that the government swiftly addresses “the missing piece” in the UK's space ambitions and establishes a national space programme, sitting alongside the UK's existing contributions to the European Space Agency.
Nicola Blackwood MP, chair of the Science & Technology Committee, said: "For the last six months, attention has rightly been focused on Major Tim Peake and Britain's role in human space flight. But it's important to remember that our space and satellite SMEs also need to access space, usually via unmanned missions, in order to test the innovative products that they've been developing, like the small satellites used to observe the changing biology of the oceans. Without this 'flight heritage', space SME's struggle to get their ideas out of the lab and successfully commercialised."
In 2012–13 the UK space economy – which encompasses a range of activities from ‘upstream’ companies that manufacture, launch and operate satellites and launch vehicles, to the ‘downstream’ organisations that “make use of the signals and data supplied by these space assets to develop value-added applications”, such as meteorological services - generated a turnover of £11.8 billion, directly employed more than 35,000 people and had delivered year-on-year economic growth rates of about 8% over the previous decade.
The government plans to grow the UK’s global share in the space market from 6.5% to 10% by 2030. By today’s estimates, this would lead to a UK sector with £40 billion per annum of space-enabled turnover and up to 100,000 skilled jobs.
However, the Committee report Satellites and Space warned that despite its impressive track record the UK space sector is too inward-looking and has been “unduly modest” about its achievements. This has led to a “general lack of awareness of the well-established sector and the ways in which satellite data can be used by bodies that sit outside of the traditional space sector”.
The report recommends government and local authorities do more to stimulate awareness and growth through “applying space-enabled services to help achieve effective and efficient policy delivery”.
It highlighted the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as a 'trail-blazer' for using satellite data to assist with flood modelling and response, but the committee said other departments were lagging behind.
Blackwood also warned that more work must be done for the government’s plans for a UK spaceport, which she said has so far only focused on horizontal launch capacity for suborbital flights, without a vertical launch capacity that limits the use and value to the space and satellite industry.
“The UK has, so far, only taken small steps towards launching a national space programme that would enable our innovative space and satellite industries to get the ‘flight heritage’ they need. Now is the time to take a confident leap towards that goal and build on the foundations of the National Space Technology Programme," she added.