UK Space Industry

David Johnston Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[David Johnston (Wantage) (Con) [V]]

I am hugely proud to have Harwell Campus in my constituency for all sorts of reasons, but one of them is its space cluster. It has 105 organisations working on space, which is the largest number of organisations within walking distance of each other anywhere in the world. We have a whole range of organisations, from industry and academia to Government, working together, such as RAL Space—which is building the national satellite test facility that will enable companies to build the next generation of spacecraft and test them in the UK—and Astroscale, which works on sweeping the estimated 170 million items of space debris so that we can have a more sustainable space.

If most people were asked to envisage space, I imagine they would think of astronauts and spacecraft making landings, but as has been touched on, space affects a whole range of the challenges we are facing, from our understanding of diseases to our efforts on climate change. MDA at Harwell developed the new module that was recently installed on the International Space Station, allowing its crew to send the results of their experiments to Earth much faster to aid our understanding of ageing, Parkinson’s, cancer and a whole range of other things. Then there are companies such as Rezitech, whose technology enables us to monitor water pipes that might be at risk of bursting and threats to our forests.

There is lots being learned at Harwell, and in my three minutes, I want to touch on four important things. The first is the importance of our small and medium enterprises: we have great SMEs with real expertise, and when they work together in a cluster, we can multiply their impact. The second is the importance of the commitment from Government, which is why I think the national space strategy is so important: it will encourage companies to make commitments that they would not otherwise make without that assurance.

The third is inspiring the next generation to want to work in space. Thales Alenia Space has a great Mars balloon programme that allows young people to build experiments in Kinder-like eggs and send them to a 30 km altitude, so that they can mimic the atmosphere of Mars and hopefully be inspired to want to work in this area in the future.

The fourth and final one is ambition. Everything involving space involves ambition, and I am hugely pleased with the Government’s ambition to have 10% of the global space industry by 2030. That cascades through to companies such as Oxford Space Systems, which wants to be the global leader for its deployable antenna. With that ambition, the commitment from Government and the work at Harwell, we might even exceed that 10%, but we will certainly continue to punch above our weight.