Tools to grow the UK space industry
It's not rocket science. If you've got an industry that is already growing, even in a recession, it makes sense to give it more support. Back a winner.
This is the simple message to come out of a looking at the opportunities for the UK space sector and the things it needs to do to grab a bigger share of the global market.
The believes British industry can increase its current 6% share of world space commerce to about 10% - a projected £40bn a year - by 2030.
To get there, industry itself is going to have to invest more - billions more. And government is going to have to spend more - hundreds of millions more. Indeed the report talks about the need for government to all but double its annual civil space budget to £550m over the next 10 years.
In a recession that's a hard sell, and with all the pressure to reduce the huge public deficit, the notion that government space spending might actually increase seems unlikely. We'll see. Only the Treasury can answer that question.
But there are some financial tools out there which could be deployed now to help industry.
We've seen get off the ground recently with the help of low-interest loans that were available because governments were willing to underwrite the risk.
, the French export guarantee agency, has been particularly active in this area, as has the in the US. Britain should also be more active in this area, says the S-IGS.
One tool that has already been shown to work very well in the UK space arena is the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
British armed forces now have access to three state-of-the-art telecommunications satellites that were financed largely by City money.
The highly secure is owned and run by a private company, .
It has a long contract with its "anchor tenant", the Ministry of Defence, to provide satcom services. This guarantees the company income and Paradigm supplements this by selling excess bandwidth on the spacecraft to Nato and other friendly countries.
To date, the PFI has been successful enough for Paradigm to start discussions on building a fourth satellite in the series - Skynet-5D.
The deal seems to have been a good one for the British taxpayer, also.
They've acquired the best satellites for the Army, Royal Navy and RAF without having to put the money upfront and all the risk that involves.
The suggestion in the S-IGS is that this model should now be applied to Earth observation - the practice of imaging the planet to find out how it is changing, everything from urban planning and forest management to mapping pollution and assessing storm damage.
Britain does not have a national EO capability. Government departments buy commercial services that are based on data acquired, by and large, by foreign satellites, principally US ones.
But the report believes there is enough EO need within government that if it were rounded up it would constitute the critical mass that could then act as the anchor tenant in a Skynet-like Earth observation programme.
The core UK need would be serviced by a fleet of British-built EO spacecraft, again financed by City money. And, again, spare capacity would be sold to whoever wanted it.
The concept is already being dubbed "Skysight".
The point is this: you can spend money and care only about the product, or you can procure that same product in a way that creates jobs and builds expertise at home.
Sir Martin Sweeting founded , which has become a world leader in the production of small imaging spacecraft. He believes the PFI could be made to work for EO:
It would have a snowball effect. First of all you would provide a national capability which means we can do things independently. That would stimulate business and that would lead you to demand the next generation of instruments. That in turn would stimulate the scientific SMEs and the universities. Then people would start thinking about how to improve data processing. I think there is real value in these models for getting better value for government money and even saving government money.
It's worth thinking about, certainly.
As a postscript to Wednesday's launch of the Space Innovation and Growth Strategy, it has emerged that two names are now in the running for the
They are the "UK Space Agency" and "Her Majesty's Space Agency".
Watch this space.
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