The Space Economy (UK Engagement with Space Committee Report)

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, what a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness and to take part in this debate. I thank my noble friend Lady Ashton for the masterful way she introduced the report; she made every single point that I had jotted down to say myself.

I want to thank all my fellow members of the committee, because it was a very happy committee and we were very enthusiastic and conscientious about the work that we did. I reread our report in the run-up to this debate. It is a really good report, and I think it will last the test of time because space is an area for the future.

I also want to thank our excellent staff. We had an extremely interesting visit to the Harwell campus, and we had some very interesting witnesses giving evidence to us, including some that people have heard of, such as Brian Cox and Tim Peake. I also want to mention Professors Edhem, Wheeler, and Dougherty, because they also gave evidence, as did many others.

It is hard to know the first thing to say. I wish there were more Members in the Chamber because it would be very educative for them. The first thing to say about space is that it is anything but empty. Figure 4 in our report shows the exponential growth of satellites in the last few years. People may not realise just how many there are. It brings the problem of space debris, which I will come back to.

There are some 50,000 tracked items of debris and, some have suggested, up to 1 million other items that are small, but big enough to do real damage. The International Space Station had to adjust its orbit to avoid collision. In November last year, Chinese astronauts were stranded in space because the spacecraft that was going to take them back to earth had been hit by space debris. It was a pretty serious situation, but they did manage to get back safely.

My noble friend referred to how this satellite was brought in: with an arm that sort of grabbed it—I can grab my noble friend beside me as an example—and slowed it down, so that it could then be released and burn up in the atmosphere. At the moment, the same thing is going on in reverse. NASA is trying to save a space telescope by taking another object up there to push it into a higher orbit, so it does not fall to earth.

I will say something about the amount of stuff in space which falls to earth and gets burned up. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, made a perfectly good point about the pollution aspects. We live on a very polluted earth, and we must guard against the dangers of being, as was said by one of our witnesses in giving evidence, a pollution sandwich between debris in space and on earth. This brings great challenges.

Another thing to say about space, which has already been said by many people, is how vital it is to us on earth. There is a sentence about people born in 2025—I am grateful to my noble friend for mentioning that they happen to include my own first granddaughter—whose lives are going to be dominated by what happens in space, and our report lists some of these predictions. In the full-colour version of the report, which I recommend, you will see the photographs that we deliberately chose to make it clear to people that space matters. At my granddaughter’s first birthday, I met a farmer who I had an interesting conversation with, and space is just as relevant in farming. It also matters in day-to-day life—where literally would we be without global positioning systems? At the moment, we do not need a satellite to tell us that the weather is hot and is going to stay hot, but all these things are vital. Pharmaceutical things have been mentioned, and we are going to find a lot more of this.

I say to my noble friend the Minister that it is important for the structure of government to do justice to the subject under discussion, and there needs to be more direction from the Government. We are about to have a new Prime Minister, and it would be nice to have a space Minister. Nevertheless, we need to address a lot of the other things, such as the skills challenges—heaven knows, there should be careers advisers in schools pointing out the unbelievable opportunities of the future for people working in the space area.

I want to draw attention not just to this report but to a report from the Science and Technology Committee that has not yet been debated in this House. It is, rather dramatically, called Bleeding to Death: the Science and Technology Growth Emergency, and it tackles the way in which we are unable in this country to scale up businesses, and that applies just as much to space. For all the companies that I hope will prosper in the UK space economy of the future—which will be a very big part of the economy, and the sooner His Majesty’s Treasury understands that, the better—access to scale-up capital is going to be terribly important.

My time has run out, so I end by repeating what has already been said: our subtitle, “Act Now or Lose Out”, is a plea to the Government to grasp the opportunity before us and help make the UK a real leader in the space economy of the future.