Space Industry Bill [Lords]

Paul Beresford Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 15th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)]

I certainly agree with the parting shot that I heard from my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson).

I am tiptoeing into this debate from a position of enthusiasm but not very much knowledge. I am learning quietly and quickly, and have been for some weeks. I am very aware of the Bill’s importance, but also, as others have said, of having a spaceport—or two. The thought of the All Blacks flying on an A380 for two or three hours to Australia and for four hours from Australia to this country, and then landing in Devon or Cornwall and tiptoeing on to a train to take another four hours to reach London is an exciting one. However, from the knowledge I have been learning, it seems to me that we need more than one site—and, because the Bill is going through, we need this urgently—and they should have facilities for vertical launch, horizontal launch or both.

Space and the space industry have been of considerable interest to me ever since I was a lad in New Zealand. I hasten to add that, as I have already said, my interest is not matched by knowledge. My knowledge has been further stimulated, however, by discovering and visiting on several occasions not just the Surrey satellite business that was mentioned, but—closer to home for me—the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in my constituency. It is part of University College London, and has been working on that site in Holmbury St Mary for over 70 years. I would be delighted to take the Minister, and even the Secretary of State, for a visit—if we can find it; it is hidden away.

Mullard is in an old manor house with beautiful grounds in the hills above and beyond Dorking. As one enters through the archway with its double doors into the foyer, one sees standing—alongside the ancient chandelier, and heading up into the wooden stairwell—two rockets from a bygone day. One only has to be there a wee while, however, to feel the pulse of the IQ of the scientific intelligence, which is quite staggering, of the people all around the site. There are modern buildings at the back, including a fantastic laboratory, and room for a little bit more building.

Mullard supports the Bill. At present, anything developed by the Mullard centre or other commercial or research organisations—this has been mentioned—is taken away from the UK to be launched. As the Mullard people have explained to me, this often means a loss of control. With the Bill and the development of our launch sites, which must go hand in hand and promptly, we will now be able to utilise British research and expertise in Britain to the benefit of Britain.

To give a feel of the importance of that, I wish to dwell for a few moments on the broad spectrum of the research going on. Just at this centre, there are 180 people—academics, engineers, post-doctoral researchers, postgraduate students and support staff. The research areas are staggering: they are doing astrophysics, solar physics, space plasma physics and planetary science, and researching climate extremes on earth, space medicine, space imaging analysis and detection systems. They are world-renowned experts in manufacturing scientific space instruments, although those instruments go not into our satellites but elsewhere.

Those at the centre have contributed equipment and expertise to projects such as Euclid, which is studying dark matter, the ExoMars rover, the solar orbiter—a large spacecraft mission that includes three Mullard-built plasma instruments—and the ESA solar wind electronic instrument. Additionally, they are partners in the team building an instrument containing three extreme ultraviolet telescopes. The Mullard team are building the electronics that will make them work. Perhaps most interestingly at the moment—this has been mentioned—they are building miniature instruments on QB50 CubeSats, which are small satellites of 30 cm by 10 cm by 10 cm. They are being deployed from the international space station, not from the United Kingdom. With the Bill and the development of the launch sites, I hope that UK firms will soon be able to directly operate the satellites they build and the instruments within them. Reaction Engines has been touched on, and it is vital that such British inventions remain in our hands.

I want to mention a few other points, some of which have also been touched on. Anyone with any knowledge, even if is as limited as mine, can see there is a huge future in space technology. Alongside the Bill, we need to establish the structure for launching spacecraft from the United Kingdom, whether those launches are vertical or horizontal. This will enable the development of commercial applications, of which the most talked about—it has been mentioned several times today—is of course space tourism. However, other considerable commercial prospects are being developed. The most understandable is the launching worldwide of constellations of satellites, particularly those to provide worldwide broadband facilities. I understand this is commercially in the offing, and it should be helped in the United Kingdom both by the Bill and—if I may repeat myself—by the provision of at least one site and possibly two or more sites. The Minister will be aware of that, and we have clearly rubbed it in throughout this debate.

In looking at the Bill, we must make sure that the new legislation does not hold back commercial and scientific development and research. The way in which the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald), talked made me feel gloomy, because regulation can cripple just such developments. For example, a huge effort is now being put into developing nano-satellites and constellations of satellites, and there is a realistic prospect of the world benefiting from constellations of satellites across the world.

We must, however, be careful for two reasons. First, there has been some mention of space debris and its generation, and the dangers of collisions are obvious. All the equipment shot into space has an end to its operational life, which may be a considerable number of years; indeed, some of the Mullard equipment is still running extremely successfully 15 years after its launch. I understand that this is under discussion and that the Minister may feel it is not appropriate to pass legislation at this time. However, if he is going to do something, I hope he does so with a certain freedom and looks at making the equipment disintegrate by design, so that it burns up as it returns towards the earth.

The second point, which has also been mentioned several times, is indemnifying insurance, a subject in which I have a little interest. We of course need it in case of accidents, which may happen, but we should recognise that we need not be stringent in the level of protection applied. I believe that the negative effect on any firm or research organisation of something going wrong would be far more damaging and would create a bigger hole than the actual financial one. At the moment, because of the cost, the prospect is that the Mullard laboratory will have to transfer the ownership of its developments to countries that have more appropriate arrangements to avert insurance costs and will therefore lose control of the project. That would be disastrous: if we provided the sites and took through the Bill, but then crippled such organisations with insurance liabilities, we would have wasted our time.

I note that, in certain circumstances, the Secretary of State will provide at least part of the indemnity. I am keen for the Government to recognise that they could consider providing more, if not total, cover for research organisations, such as Mullard, developing this equipment —nano-satellites, CubeSats—in carefully selected research projects. In many ways, the UK leads the world in space research and technology, but this problem of indemnity is threatening that position.

I was reminded by a very elderly gentleman that before the second world war rockets were banned in the UK and, I believe, in America, so there was no progress, but they were not banned in Germany, and Germany produced the V2. We need to think and move ahead positively, and I most certainly support the Bill.