The Future of the UK in Space
I discuss what the UK currently has planned in space, and the need for radical change.
Most people go through their lives without thinking much at all about space or space policy. They have higher priorities both for themselves and for the country, and the lack of attention from voters means space receives little attention from politicians.
But a nation’s capabilities in space are becoming increasingly a defining characteristic of its power. All of the territories of Earth are, either by sovereignty or international treaty, pretty much accounted for. The international order is determined and attempts to change it are resisted. But space is a blank, unclaimed canvas of resources and energy, of a far larger scope than the entirety of Earth put together. The nations, alliances and international orders that utilise even a fraction of this will eclipse those that do not.
The relevant metric is mass; and the amount of mass being sent to orbit per year has been on an exponential trajectory for several years. SpaceX have largely driven this trend by making their Falcon 9 cheap and reusable, and others are following the trend. The China National Space Agency has increased its launch cadence and several companies are working on their own reusable rockets. The growth of mass to orbit has at the time of writing a doubling time of less than 2 years, comparable to the doubling time of transistor count which drove the computer revolution.
Against this background, the UK has formed a space policy that assumes a static situation, or at least incremental improvements. Thus we are set up to fall behind and become irrelevant over time. A policy should be made to set aside a small amount of national wealth to see that this does not happen, and we retain some level of international status in the future. But this does not appear to have been done.
The Current State of Affairs
The outgoing UK government, earlier this year, produced a Space Industrial Plan. This is a document that outlines how to achieve goals set out in the National Space Strategy published in 2021 and the Defence Space Strategy published in 2022, building on the National Space Strategy in Action document published in 2023. This is a fair chunk of documentation to wade through, but not a lot is really said.
The 2021 National Space Strategy came on the heels of Boris Johnson’s inaugural speech in the House of Commons as Prime Minister, where he made specific mention of space. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the pandemic, there seemed to be little follow up on this interest besides the strategy document.
This document is a few years old, and lacked some specifics, and so I’m going to turn now to the 2024 Space Industrial Plan, in order to gauge the UK governments most recent position. The intentions of this are explained on page 5:
Until now, our approach to R&D and regulation to support space industrial growth has generated a wide range of small, innovative companies. We aim to move towards a system that nurtures key players of all sizes in the space industry. This plan is driven by our need to be more efficient in our use of resources, so we have set out a sequenced and prioritised plan of action to give industry and government confidence to invest long-term in the UK space sector. Alongside a commercially driven pull for R&D funding from industry, we want to send a strong demand signal in a targeted set of capabilities where we want the UK to excel. Industry can then proactively respond to clear government demand, creating a ‘virtuous circle’ for space in the UK, modernising the relationship between government and industry.
This, on the face of it, is good stuff. But let’s think about how this plan is formulated…
Through extensive workshops, dialogues with industry and collaboration across government we have built our understanding of what needs to change.
So the established industry of small companies gets to set the agenda - which will no doubt focus on the interests of small companies. The interests of the national program do not necessarily align with the interests of existing companies!
The result of this consultation is setting five “National Space Capability” goals prioritised for 2030. They are Space Domain Awareness (SDA), In-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (IOSAM), Space data for Earth applications, Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT), and Satellite Communication Technology. Unsurprisingly, these are mostly things the UK space industry does already. There is no mention of human spaceflight. No mention of ISRU. No mention of heavy lift capability. The government here has essentially shrugged in confusion, turned over decision making to private companies, and then stenographically repeated their entirely predictable requests for more revenue.
Some of these capabilities come from the military - and are perfectly valid in the context of increasing space threats. I have myself written about the danger of especially Russian ASAT capabilities for instance. But military spending isn’t in itself an economic strategy. Our defence budget should have an increasing allotment for capabilities such as space domain awareness - but such spending should not count towards what our government ought to be spending on civilian space activities.
For launch there is a mere pat on the head. On page 9:
The Launch Programme has enabled a market in the UK attracting inward investment, with the spaceports bringing launch operators to the UK. Rocket manufacturers like Orbex and Skyrora have established their headquarters in the UK, collectively employing around 150 people across the UK. We support these companies’ ambitions to grow in the UK and export internationally to the extent possible to realise our capability goals and broader benefits.
All this aspires to be an implementation of the National Space Strategy. This document from 2021 does at least pay lip service to more ambitious goals around human spaceflight and In-Situ Resource Utilisation, which makes it all the more telling how cleanly they have been expunged from the more recent document.
Continuing on, there are sections on general industrial strategy, which are probably OK but don’t really say anything about space, a call to deepen ties with ESA which is also perfectly reasonable - but defers the question of strategy to that organisation, once again failing to show leadership. What do we want ESA to do with additional support from the UK? Subsequent sections speak of the role of government as being there to encourage investment and communicate the importance of space. Again not bad, but not very substantive.
What I read in this plan is a mere description of dynamism, an idea that sufficient Westminster cheer-leading (and some small amounts of money) can produce outsized and poorly specified breakthroughs. There is a lack of direction and focus. The people writing these documents don’t seem to care very much.
In the face of an exponential change, which will render much of these documents irrelevant even by 2030, the UK has chosen a box ticking exercise garnished with buzzwords.
An Alternative: A plan for 2100
We should approach space more seriously and plan for the much longer term. The end of the current century is not that far away - 76 years at the time of writing. If my children only live as long as my grandfather did, then they will both still be around then. With current life expectancy and no breakthroughs in human longevity, most current primary school children will see the dawn of the 22nd century. And what kind of country we are by that point depends on the actions we take now, and is disproportionately based on the actions we take regarding space. So this deserves to be taken more seriously by government.
I propose that, just as we have a NATO commitment to spend 2.5% of GDP on defence, we should have a comparable one for space development. I propose it to be set at 1% of government spending. People often ask why we should spend money on space when there are problems on Earth - well, that is what the other 99% of spending is for. Investing about 1/5th of our defence commitment into ensuring the long term future of our civilisation is I think fairly modest.
This is not a call for a massively expanding the UK Space Agency though - its mission is science and not development, and should stay as such. What I am calling for is a separate organisation with a distinct remit. It’s aim would be to supply as many kilograms of payload to space activities as possible, by making each kilogram sent to space an investment that would make the next kilogram cheaper, or more useful, or even sourced from another planet. Science missions are strictly optimised for maximum scientific results per kilogram, and thus represent pure consumption rather than investment. This is why traditional space agencies pull such as NASA have never seriously attempted a development strategy despite numerous technical proposals and lobbying to do so.
A development agency would work with private industry, probably in a similar way to how the government already wants to work with industry. But it would so so with specific national goals in mind, and driven by different metrics. I have developed one such metric in my academic work. There is considerable flexibility in how to pursue this - through launch, lunar resources, asteroids etc. - which would mean government could commit to a direction of travel without picking a specific method at this time.
Times may be hard, but there will never really be an easy time to do difficult things. The best time to make long term plans is always now. Let’s go to the stars.
Thanks for reading. This one is free for all readers, but some of my work is for paid subscribers only. Upgrading gets you full access to articles like these:
An analysis of Japan’s contribution to the Artemis program and what the UK can learn from it.
The history and current state of the art of partial gravity research, important for building human colonies on Mars or the Moon.
How the threat of ASAT weapons and satellite constellation technology could lead to a militarisation of space.
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