Lord Willetts is President of the Resolution Foundation. He is a former Minister for Universities and Science, and Chair of the UK Space Agency.
Britain is the only country to have had the capacity to launch its own satellite with its own rocket – as we did from Woomera, Australia back in 1971 – and then renounced it. When we first thought of returning to launch back in 2014, it was seen as a fantasy. Last week, we took another step to achieving this even though, sadly, the Virgin Orbit rocket did not quite make it. But we must keep at it as getting into launch is a fantastic opportunity for us.
Space is seen by sceptics as a luxury – esoteric science plus vanity projects for billionaires. But it is now at last getting sustained attention, and as a result people are beginning to recognise what Space can do for us. Space is exciting – but, more than that, it is incredibly useful too.
Space is part of our critical national infrastructure. It is essential for communications – we would not have the modern trinity of Positioning, Navigation and Timing without it. The next stage is for our own mobile phones to be able to link directly up to satellites: Apple’s new iPhone 14 has a link to satellites for SOS messages.
These services used to be delivered using big satellites – as big as a van, almost 25,000 miles up in geo-stationary orbit. (And, incidentally, Britain is a leader at making these.) It takes a lot of energy to get these big beasts up into Space, and launching from near to the equator gives you the most boost, because they are kind of thrown forward with the speed of the Earth’s rotation. So most of the world’s main Space launch facilities tend to be broadly equatorial, and are often by the coast or desert so that they can launch with less risk.
Now we are seeing a shift to much smaller satellites in big constellations whizzing over the Earth – or rather with the Earth moving beneath them. Some of these are in polar and Sun-synchronous orbits collecting data, providing telecommunications, or observing a swath of the Earth and then another swath on their next orbit as the Earth revolves beneath them.
These satellites also enable us to monitor more and more of what is happening on Earth from tracking floods and forest fires for emergency services through to illegal logging or measuring global warning. The trend is to get more and more granular information – for example, using sophisticated spectroscopy to monitor emissions of methane or carbon dioxide from particular power stations or large facilities.
There are fantastic opportunities for Britain here. We are a world leader in making small satellites. We can use our skills in smart software and AI to extract useful information from all the data the satellites are collecting. The City can develop new services from insurance for them to green finance based on information enabling them to work out how green specific facilities are.
For launching individual small satellites, especially in polar orbit, there is not so much need for big heavy equatorial launches. Virgin Orbit’s ingenious technology enables a Jumbo jet carrying a small rocket to place small satellites in specific low Earth orbits. There are also companies developing launches from the North of Scotland, with the rockets launching out over the ocean towards the North Pole. The race is on to develop these sort of European launch capabilities, with Sweden a serious competitor to develop a launch site. But we acted early to get a legal and regulatory framework in place for launch, and that does gives us an advantage.
It is a good example of the gains from smart early standard-setting to promote innovation not to hinder it. George Freeman, the endlessly energetic Science Minister, set out some of this agenda in 2021 in a report with Iain Duncan-Smith and Theresa Villiers from TIGGR (the Taskforce on Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform).
The billionaires get the significance of Space. To regard their Space activities as some eccentric self-indulgence is to fail to grasp what they are really up to. Indeed, they may have rather similar strategies. Think of Elon Musk as tracking us through our electric cars and Jeff Bezos doing the same – but through our homes, not just with Amazon deliveries but with Alexa as well.
The strategy behind what they are doing in Space is to invest in satellite constellations, which will give them a complete communications network behind their services to us in our home or our car. Other companies’ self-drive cars will need to pay a separate satellite operator for the location services they need. Tesla will be vertically integrated with Starlink, so Elon Musk’s cars will have exceptional connectivity. It’s the same for Amazon tracking deliveries and operating smart systems in the home.
There are going to be a few major global constellations. It so happens that one of the other constellations is OneWeb headquartered in Shepherds Bush, West London, where they monitor more satellites than any other facility in Europe.
I was one of the advocates of Boris Johnson’s bold decision to take a stake in it when its main funder, Softbank, got into difficulties and could not afford to invest further. (See my piece on this site in November 2021 comparing it to Disraeli’s bold move to buy the Suez Canal. But unlike Disraeli we did not nationalise the company. We took a shareholding and successfully helped it secure new commercial investment.) They have just launched – successfully – another batch of their satellites as they work to complete their constellation and start planning the next one.
Operating in Space is still at the frontier. There are risks, as we saw last week. And there is a nightmare scenario in which Space becomes so congested and filled with clouds of debris that key orbits become unusable. Britain has actually taken the lead in the UN in promoting the responsible use of Space. There is a fantastic opportunity here for us and for the wider world.