Senin, 25 Juni 2012

CITY FOCUS: British space firms looking set to boldly grow . . .

CITY FOCUS: British space firms looking set to boldly grow . . .

By William Cook

PUBLISHED: 16:04 EST, 25 June 2012 | UPDATED: 16:17 EST, 25 June 2012

Enlarge   We have lift-off: UK space industry total turnover

Back in 1962, a NASA rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral carrying the first satellite designed and built by British scientists.

The launch made Britain the third nation ever to put a satellite into space. Over the following years, four home-grown Black Arrow rockets would take British payloads into orbit.

By 1971, the project lay on the scrapheap. But now, from that financial black hole has emerged a constellation of commercial opportunities.

Britain’s space industry involves around 260 firms, with a combined annual turnover of £7.5bn and a workforce of 25,000. Having defied the recession, the sector has been earmarked by government as a key growth area.

The recently-established UK Space Agency has been instrumental in nurturing this growth. Unlike NASA or its European counterpart, the agency does not carry out missions of its own (90 per cent of its budget goes straight to Europe for this purpose).
Instead the age ncy’s focus is purely commercial.

One of those seeking out new frontiers is Astrium â€" a subsidiary of European defence giant EADS and the largest space company in Europe. It received a major boost last month when the European Space Agency awarded it a £245m contract to develop a new Solar Orbiter spacecraft. Astrium employs 1,200 people at its Stevenage base, and still more at its Portsmouth and Poynton sites.

Large firms like Astrium sit alongside smaller specialist manufacturers. Business is booming for Surrey Satellite Technology, whose £10m Kepler Research facility will put together 14 satellites for Europe’s Galileo navigation programme in a deal valued at £510m. A £42m kick-start from the UKSA and industry investors will also finance SSTL’s NovaSar-S radar satellite project, which aims to make money from the sale of images of the earth.

One company driving forward the commercialisation of space is the tiny Clyde Space.

The Glasgow-based firm has dreamed up the concept of cubesats, low-cost miniature satellites that can piggyback on larger spacecraft. As with SSTL, the UKSA has helped out with initial investment. In a recent interview, Clyde Space CEO Craig Clark said: ‘historically, the UK has been highly innovative in the technology for space, but less innovative in applying this technology to commercial applications’.

Clyde Space is making good this commercial neglect, not least by being the only satellite manufacturer to allow customers to purchase components via its website.

The value to Britain’s space industry of this kind of high-tech research and manufacturing is, admittedly, dwarfed by that of the companies who buy and operate their products.

Providers of satellite services account for roughly £6.5bn of the industry’s £7.5bn contribution to GDP, and 17,600 jobs. They include world-leaders such as maritime navigation giant Inmarsat and satellite broadband provider Avanti. The Luxembourg-based Astra owns and operates the satellites that broadcast Sky TV in Britain.

It is this ‘downstream’ side of the space sector that has accounted for much of the industry’s stellar performance over the past decade, although the expansion in research, development and manufacturing has also been consistently above growth in GDP.

The commercial focus of the UK space sector has insulated firms from government spending cuts. Not so in America, where NASA’s expenditure has reduced dramatically, and where the export of spacecraft components â€" down to the last rivet â€" is restricted by outdated rules designed to protect military technology.

With the retirement of the space shuttle, could British firms lead the next generation of space travel? Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space tourism project grabs headlines, but since 1982 a team of engineers has been quietly working on a n air-breathing horizontal take-off and landing (HOTOL) ‘spaceplane’.

Codenamed SKYLON, it could provide a reusable form of space travel with much lower running costs than traditional rockets. The team, now based at the Culham Science Centre in Oxfordshire, successfully tested SKYLON’s crucial cooling system at the end of April.

The ESA’s subsequent endorsement is helping to raise the £220m required for the next stage of the project. The UKSA has been instrumental in drumming up support, but the funding itself will come largely from private sources.

Even assuming SKYLON proves technologically viable, the cost of putting it into production is estimated at billions.

But that it is attracting private investment at all shows that Britain’s commercial space industry is boldly growing as never before.


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