Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: UK Astronomy, HC 329
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 13 March 2024.
Watch the meeting
Members present: Carol Monaghan (Chair); Dawn Butler; Chris Clarkson; Tracey Crouch; Dr James Davies; Katherine Fletcher; Stephen Metcalfe; Graham Stringer.
Questions 72 - 175
Witnesses
I: Professor Gillian Wright CBE, Director, UK Astronomy Technology Centre; and Dr Geraint Morgan, Academic, The Open University.
II: Adam Woodcraft, Research and Operations, QMC Instruments; and Justin Byrne, Head of Earth Observation and Science, Airbus Defence and Space.
III: Ian Jones, Chief Executive Officer, Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd; and Professor Mahesh Anand, Professor of Planetary Science and Exploration and Deputy Head, School of Physical Sciences, Open University.
In the absence of the Chair, Carol Monaghan took the Chair.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Professor Wright and Dr Morgan.
Q72 Chair: This is the second session of the Committee’s inquiry into astronomy. Today, we are looking at the commercialisation of UK astronomy technology, its role in enabling UK participation in international programmes and its potential to be repurposed for other uses.
On our first panel today we have Professor Gillian Wright, director of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, who is joining us virtually, so welcome, Professor Wright; and Dr Geraint Morgan, member of the faculty of science, technology, engineering and mathematics at the mathematics school of physical sciences at the Open University, so welcome Dr Morgan.
Dr Morgan, may I start with you? Will you briefly introduce yourself and say a few words about what you do and the importance of UK astronomy?
Dr Morgan: I am a research fellow at the Open University, as you said. My background is as an analytical chemist. I spent the first half of my career working with Professor Colin Pillinger, developing instrumentation for the Rosetta and Beagle 2 space missions, based around mass spectrometry. For the last 15 years or so I have been looking at how we can commercialise and find other applications for the expertise as well as the technology we developed for those missions.
In particular, we have developed a prototype air monitoring system, which is now being used on UK submarines to measure air quality. We have developed a range of different analytical methodologies for food, particularly whisky, and other kinds of systems to protect the whisky brands, and we are about to translate our valve technology from the Rosetta mission. Hopefully, next Thursday we will sign a licensing agreement with a multinational satellite propulsion company to then exploit that for future satellite production.
Q73 Chair: Thank you very much, Dr Morgan. No doubt we will hear more about the whisky later on—a subject of great interest, but possibly not at 9.30 am.
Professor Wright, how is the UK Astronomy Technology Centre ensuring that the UK is able to compete for contracts in international missions and programmes?
Professor Wright: The UK Astronomy Technology Centre is one of this country’s national laboratories, and our role is to be a centre of expertise in the construction of astronomy instrumentation. We provide an in-depth set of skills, knowledge and experience in how you design and build these astronomy instruments, which ranges from the science requirements all the way through to putting them together and testing them in our laboratory facilities. That is a key part of the wider astronomy ecosystem in the UK, because how the astronomy is done is part of how the instruments are designed. We are putting the two together, enabling UK scientists to get into leadership positions. Obviously, that also means that we are enabling industry in the UK to be part of constructing those activities. Certainly, that role sits not just with the UK ATC but more broadly in the Science and Technologies Facilities Council, but we are the astronomy spearhead for it.
Q74 Chair: You mentioned industry. How do you support industry in terms of access, training, skills and those kinds of areas?
Professor Wright: There are multiple ways in which that happens. In our supplier chain, we often find that, because we are looking to push the envelope a little bit in what companies can do, we are upskilling the companies by working with them. We have industry liaison officers, not at UK ATC but in STFC, who have active roles. When big contracts are coming up, they get out into the industry community and organise days for the industry to come and meet, discuss their requirements and build their understanding. Also, the STFC’s Business and Innovations Directorate runs more explicit training schemes where they build links with the companies and bring them in through that.
Q75 Chair: What is the rough split between private and public funding for these activities in the projects that you support?
Professor Wright: The astronomy instruments are publicly funded. They are for the science, so they are part of the astronomy funding in the UK, but some of the other activities are mixed private-public funding. For example, if we look at the Higgs Centre for Innovation and how the business incubation works, probably somewhere between one third and half of the funding those companies receive is Government funding, but then that leverages private investment in those companies.
Q76 Chair: In that innovation centre, is it the case that a company will come and say, “We have this problem, we need your help to solve it and we will provide this money to do it”? Is that the kind of model?
Professor Wright: The STFC business incubation scheme—which in Edinburgh is the Higgs Centre for Innovation; they also have the Daresbury and Rutherford Appleton sites—is competitive. The companies have to have a business idea. They are often small, spin-out companies from different areas of physics. They get business support, so they are helped to grow quickly in terms of learning business. The Business Innovations Directorate helps them to make connections with private investment into their companies. The ones on site here often benefit from technical discussions with our skills and expertise around how to do things, so, yes, it is about helping them to solve problems, including with academics from the University of Edinburgh, if, say, the company is working in the software area.
Chair: Thank you. I turn now to my colleagues.
Q77 Dawn Butler: Thank you, Professor Wright. We talk on this Committee about collaborations. What role does the UK Astronomy Technology Centre play in regard to collaborations, be that with SMEs or the wider industry?
Professor Wright: We also have a role internationally. All the work we do is part of very large international collaborations. It is all collaborative, in that sense. Within a particular part of astronomy, instrumentation, we might have a lead on a work package or a particular technical area that is then collaborating with institutes all round Europe, or the world, depending on the project, and we would bring industry into those collaborations, either through direct procurement or by working alongside the industry.
To use as an example some of the software we are developing for the Square Kilometre Array, our software engineers here have the key role in designing the architect of the software—how it is going to work for astronomy—whereas the companies are more involved in actually developing and delivering the software modules to the Square Kilometre Array Observatory as it is being built.
Q78 Dawn Butler: Does that mean that what you do is unique? Is it well known and universally understood?
Professor Wright: Yes. We are extremely well known internationally and among the UK university community of astronomers.
Q79 Dawn Butler: What is the size of the astronomy sector in regard to jobs and inward investment?
Professor Wright: I am not the right person to ask about that. There is a massive number of grants to universities; somewhere in the order of 40 universities in the UK have active astronomy groups. I am sorry, I do not have the top-level number of the grant funding to all those universities.
Q80 Dawn Butler: That’s all right; no problem. Do you think that you need more money? We ask everyone that, and no one ever says no to that question, but do you think that it is good value for money? What are your thoughts around all of that?
Professor Wright: What the astronomy community achieves in the UK is very good value for money. If you look at things like the citation indices of the research that is done and its international standing, they indicate that, for the level of funding, what happens in the UK is a really high achievement rate in terms of the scientific impact of everybody’s work—the whole community. We are a part of that ecosystem. I know that there is always pressure on budgets and there is always ambition from the astronomy community to do more. We have big leadership roles in international astronomy endeavour, and with more funding we could clearly do more of that. We could also do some of the relationships with industry a little more strongly, especially in the early phases of technology development, where being able to co-develop with industry might enhance, if you like, the involvement of industry. Yes, of course we can do more with more funding, and there is a lot more to do.
Dawn Butler: Thank you, Professor Wright.
Q81 Dr Davies: Professor Wright, thank you again for joining us this morning. What success has the UK Astronomy Technology Centre had in supporting work to repurpose astronomy technology for other sectors?
Professor Wright: Taking the Higgs Centre for Innovation, which is more subtle than repurposing technology because it is about the access it gets to expertise, the companies that come into the business incubation there typically start as two-person spin-out-type companies. By the time they leave, they have built their workforce to 10 people, so they are creating real jobs and things for which there is a real market. There is a greater than 90% success rate among the companies that come into the business incubation centre. That is one aspect.
The other aspect is that, much as I think we are going to hear from my colleague at the Open University, a small part of our programme at the UK ATC is about actively applying our skills and expertise in real multidisciplinary research. One example is our retinal densitometer, which measures changes in your eye that are related to the early onset of eye disease. That project was led from the University of Cardiff, where we worked with opticians and medical scientists. That is now in medical trials in Cardiff, so it is an example of a successful use of that technology. STFC has a £4 million-a-year grant funding scheme that is explicitly aimed at taking the technologies developed for not only astronomy but particle or nuclear physics—our big science programme—and looking at their applications.
Examples are things like how you categorise, count and study stars. That is not dissimilar to monitoring populations for endangered species from satellite images, for example. There is a very successful project around that. There is another one around tree cover that has led to long-term multidisciplinary collaborations. People at the University of Cambridge are looking at medical applications of some astronomy software, using those skills to build virtual reality cancer tumours that are useful for cancer research. There is a very wide range of applications of the technologies and a lot of multidisciplinary research is happening that comes from the astronomy programme.
Q82 Dr Davies: That is very interesting to hear. Clearly, there are many applications. Is there potential for more? In terms of jobs and economic benefit for the country as a whole, what do you think could be realised?
Professor Wright: There is potential for more, and certainly there is a lot of overlap, for example, between astronomy and the environmental sciences. In simple terms, studying the atmospheres of other planetary bodies is not dissimilar to turning the problem the other way and looking at our own atmosphere. That is an area where there could be a lot of growth. Astronomy is already contributing, but that could grow.
Q83 Dr Davies: Thank you. Dr Morgan, do you have any perspectives on the use of astronomy technology in other sectors?
Dr Morgan: Yes. My background is in planetary sciences, which is a small part of that. We develop miniature analytical systems. As I mentioned before, we were engaged by the MOD and BAE Systems to develop the air monitoring system that is now on UK submarines. That has broken a 30-year US monopoly on the supply of that and generated 13 jobs in an SME up in Yorkshire, which has signed a very large contract with the MOD to supply it continuously.
Similar to what Professor Wright said, a lot of the investment goes into the people who design the instrumentation and the missions. I have found it much easier to sell solutions to people’s problems with the multidisciplinary teams you require for space instrumentation. You need engineers, chemists, physicists, geologists, microbiologists—a whole range of different expertise. The opportunities are just as big as anyone wants to make them.
For instance, we are now working with a multinational car company, using our sniffing technology to make sure that its cars are meeting regulations and to help it reduce costs. As I mentioned at the beginning, we are helping the whisky industry. We are capable of identifying more compounds in complex samples. Whisky is very complex, as are other distilled spirits. In collaboration with commercial companies, we are able to apply new tools to help answer questions such as how long you should leave a whisky in an oak barrel, what happens to the chemistry and what happens if you change the recipe or the process. There is a whole range of different applications.
Dr Davies: Maybe we need a separate inquiry into that, Chair.
Q84 Chair: I am sorry to interrupt, Dr Davies, but may I ask specifically about the whisky? I may have an interest. There is a huge industry around whisky tasting, distilling and trying to get the perfect blend. Can you see this technology replacing traditional roles?
Dr Morgan: That is controversial. The one pushback I tend to have is from the master distillers, because of course they are the experts in that. But they are not really scalable. These people are very, very skilled. Our machines can prove that they are very good at their jobs, but there is a massive growing industry now for whisky. By the end of this year, there will be £1 billion-worth of whisky in barrels in England. There are 50 distilleries in England now making whisky. We have just been funded to work with the English Whisky Guild, the trade organisation for the new sector, to help them characterise. We have previously helped the Welsh whisky industry and we are helping In the Welsh Wind.
Q85 Chair: Is it also about detecting fakes?
Dr Morgan: Yes. Basically, we are able to fingerprint each whisky. Because you have different ingredients and processes, each whisky will have a unique signature. We smell around 500 compounds when we smell whisky. Each one of those is different, but, using our tools, we can characterise the whisky and use what is effectively software machine learning—or AI, as I suppose people call it these days—to train the system to look for fakes and adulterated species.
Chair: Thank you. Sorry, Dr Davies.
Q86 Dr Davies: I have one final question for Professor Wright. What lessons can you learn from analogous organisations in other countries—organisations that do what you do in other countries?
Q87 Professor Wright: This is about the funding of early-stage things before they become very real. At the moment, there is a lot of discussion in the astronomy community about what the successor for the James Webb space telescope will be. The next big NASA flagship mission will be looking for biosignatures in the atmospheres of planets around other stars. That mission is in the very early stages of discussions among astronomers about what it really needs to do, and we are seeing the beginnings of technology development studies for the new technologies that will be able to drive the mission forward.
Countries such as France and Italy are already very organised in technology development studies, whereas while we are having some very high-profile scientific input into the discussions about the missions and the sciences funded, the technology development is maybe not there; at the moment, it is quite hard to find funding in the UK for the very early phases because it is not yet a real mission.
Q88 Chair: If the money were there, would there be the capacity and capability to replicate what has been done in Italy here in the UK?
Professor Wright: Yes, there would. There are a number of highly skilled astronomy groups around the UK that are interested in developing some of the technologies. There are other technologies that might be well suited in the UK that are not yet being looked at in Europe, so there are opportunities to jump on board and start doing something. But you have to recognise that the development of a mission like this is a 30-year programme, and if you start earlier, it becomes a 32 or 35-year programme, but the payoff later on is our industry getting bigger technical roles in some of these things.
Chair: Thank you.
Q89 Chris Clarkson: Dr Morgan, sticking with the commercialisation aspect, how supportive are the UK Government and the wider R&D environment of university spin-outs in this sector?
Dr Morgan: I cannot talk about spin-outs from my own personal experience, but I have certainly had start-up companies that have gone through a similar process. I have found them quite supportive. We have a very good ecosystem in the space sector, as Professor Wright mentioned. We are pretty joined up in terms of UKSA and STFC, including the European Space Agency and the ESA business incubation centres. I have had two companies go through the ESA BIC, and, as Professor Wright said, one of the biggest things, apart from the money, was the training and the networking. As an academic, you don’t think like a business person, and you have to retune your mind. Ironically, it is now helping me in my day job because I am able to attract commercial funding for research and take the research forward.
As I said, the networking was beneficial, and the access to funding, as Professor Wright said. There is also the space knowledge transfer network, which ties you in with not only other research groups but other companies. It is pretty joined up.
Q90 Chris Clarkson: Broadly speaking, a positive experience, but is there anything in particular you would change or would like to see finessed?
Dr Morgan: The issue for most start-ups comes when you have gone through the incubation process. In the UK, including at Edinburgh, Harwell, Daresbury and, nowadays, Space Park Leicester, the incubation process is excellent. The ESA business incubation centres, which are run by STFC, are some of the first in Europe and they are probably the best and most successful.
The problem comes with the question of where you go next. The so-called dip in the innovation curve tends to be the difficulty. I was lucky that when I went through the process Innovate UK had something called a space launch pad, which allowed you to have the secondary follow-on funding to let you take it a bit further forward. Unfortunately, that no longer happens. Perhaps others may like to look at that, because once you get into the venture capital arena, especially with space projects, which tend to be quite technical and have long lead times, they tend to want your arm and your legs, so by the time you get to the point of getting a financial return, your equity has been diminished.
Q91 Chris Clarkson: Sticking with that—you are right, it is a very esoteric sector—what specific support do start-ups and spin-outs get with bidding for international contracts and exporting technology? One thing we are very good at in this country is innovating, but we are very bad at then turning that into commercial results.
Dr Morgan: That is an interesting one. I have been going through that process myself with the valve capability. The situation is that the IP is owned by the Open University, but my company, which is a start-up, licensed the IP for the manufacturing licence. That was important because the university does not manufacture valves but it has the IP. Of course, customers want to try before they buy, and our custom is international. We have now got to the point of having provided and shipped test valves for them, and they are very happy with the results. They now want to have their own licence directly from the university, to cut out the middle-man, which is fine, because as an inventor at the university, I also get a share of the revenue and the royalties from that, without doing any work.
It has got a bit harder since Brexit, because of things to do with export control, particularly with satellites being potentially dual use; it therefore gets a bit complicated. We, as a small company, were approached about providing some more of the valve technologies, but it was going to be too difficult for us. It is definitely a concern for smaller companies that do not have the resources to be able to navigate that field. You are right; it is a new area that needs to be supported.
Q92 Chris Clarkson: Would you say that the Government could do more in the sector?
Dr Morgan: Yes. In trying to find out whether our valve fitted under dual-purpose or not, the websites were not very helpful.
Q93 Chris Clarkson: Professor Wright, would you like to add anything?
Professor Wright: No. That is a really good summary of the overall situation. We have seen some of the companies in our business incubator go through that as well.
Chris Clarkson: Thank you very much.
Chair: Before I come to Tracey, Katherine wants to ask something.
Q94 Katherine Fletcher: It is just a point of clarification. Dr Morgan, you have invented this amazing whizzy thing, and the IP is owned by the Open University. You have set up a firm to try to find commercial customers. The commercial customers love it and want to go back to the university to simplify the contractual chain. Did you have to set up the business to allow that to happen? Did you have to set up the spin-out? Can you explain why?
Dr Morgan: It is not a spin-out. To be clear, the university does not have a stake in the company. However, we had had the patent for nine years and nothing was happening. We had an approach from a NASA project. NASA does not invest in international universities for technology. It would have had to go through a company. You have to have a DUNS number and all that kind of stuff. There is a difference between having the intellectual property and having a product.
Q95 Katherine Fletcher: I agree. The formation of a PnL-run vehicle is essential in getting that technology to the market, even if that does not necessarily result in the business then owning and growing—
Dr Morgan: As I said, in our case, it was a win-win either way. We would make more money if we did it ourselves through the company, but inevitably a company will want to go to the owners of the IP, to reduce costs. Because the university incentivises us, in that we get a share of the royalties, it was a no-brainer for us, because we can carry on doing our day job, and hopefully have an income.
Q96 Katherine Fletcher: I completely understand why you want to go back to your day job, but is there any argument at all that suggests that the university could have kept the company, or found a different way of keeping the company, to maximise the revenue coming back? I understand why you made that decision, but do you see what I mean about making more money out of the company?
Dr Morgan: No. The Open University is a distance learning university. It has 200,000 students. Its business is teaching. It is a risk to be involved with a start-up; we all know that start-ups as a whole have a very high attrition rate. There is a reputational risk for universities in being involved with start-ups.
Katherine Fletcher: I am just trying to understand how we can maximise the commercial potential of your genius for UK plc, rather than for any individual involved.
Chair: Thank you.
Q97 Tracey Crouch: I want to follow up a question that my colleague put to Professor Wright, around learning from other countries, and, in particular, the repurposing of technology. Are there any lessons to be taken?
Dr Morgan: The European Space Agency business incubation centres, in 22 countries around Europe, are apparently the biggest incubation network in the whole of Europe. Space leads in that area. I have some figures, if you would like, for the ESA BIC. It has been operating for 13 years. I think Edinburgh has been operating for five or six years as part of that process. Over 130 companies have been supported through the scheme. Those companies have raised £250 million of private investment and contribute £50 million gross value-added to the UK economy per year. There are 1,000 FTE staff in the incubatee and alumni companies, and the lifetime cost of that programme is £10 million, so it is a 25:1 kind of return. I think I saw this number on the website; 86% of those companies are still live, which is a very high ratio. As I said, that is partly because of the support and training that the entrepreneurs get from the ESA BIC. The UK ESA BIC is the most successful of all the ESA BICs.
Q98 Tracey Crouch: Amazing. Can I just ask a question out of curiosity? Our briefing notes that your “commercial projects have characterised the volatile profiles of bed bugs, avocados, chicken sheds, bagged salads, car interiors, and even urine samples”. I am really interested in how you came through the thought process: “Here’s this amazing technology for astronomy. How can I now apply it to bedbugs?”
Dr Morgan: Actually, bedbugs was one of my ESA BIC companies. Ironically, I was put in touch with my business partner through Paul Vernon, who was the head of the ESA BIC at the time. As we know, there are currently problems with bedbugs in Paris, and in London as well. He was a pest controller and said that if he walked into a room with bedbugs he could smell them. I build machines that sniff things. Our strapline was “We find them before they find you.”
Katherine Fletcher: That’s commercial training paid off.
Dr Morgan: Unfortunately, if you are going to test every hotel room and there are 1,000 hotel rooms, which, in an airport hotel, are being turned over 365 days a year, it gets quite expensive.
Q99 Tracey Crouch: How are you going to get that into a commercial product? What is the process?
Dr Morgan: That is where we struggled. We developed the solutions. We worked with a guy who grows bedbugs, so we were able to characterise the chemistry and understand how they communicate. The issue became the fact that the market was not willing to pay the cost.
Tracey Crouch: Right; thank you.
Q100 Katherine Fletcher: Your technology couldn’t just be left in a room for 10 minutes; and it is the size of a box, so it has a big price tax on it.
Dr Morgan: No, it would be relatively small, and 10 minutes would be more than enough, but it is the cost of—
Q101 Katherine Fletcher: Producing the cleverness.
Dr Morgan: Of producing it in the first place; they want to spend pennies.
Q102 Tracey Crouch: Professor Wright, you put your hand up, and I may have completely ruined your point by going down a different route, but if you want to return to the question please do.
Professor Wright: I want to follow up the comments about the ESA business incubation, because what STFC is doing is, I think, a learning from that. STFC business incubation is not just the ESA business incubation. The requirements for ESA business incubation are that the business has some connection to space, or a space technology, but STFC is looking at a much broader physics-based connection. The common theme for the companies in the Higgs Centre for Innovation is closer to robotics than to space or software. We are learning from those things, and that is part of the STFC business incubation environment. It is a bit broader.
Tracey Crouch: Thank you.
Chair: Finally, we come to Stephen Metcalfe.
Q103 Stephen Metcalfe: Thank you very much. Dr Morgan, you mentioned Brexit and how that had potentially made it more difficult to export, presumably into Europe. Do your dealings with NASA remain unchanged, or have they become more complicated as well, through unforeseen consequences?
Dr Morgan: I think they have stayed the same, but I have limited interaction with NASA.
Stephen Metcalfe: Okay. You mentioned NASA; but it has been limited. Okay, fine. Thank you.
Chair: I thank our two panellists, Dr Morgan and Professor Wright. I don’t think any of us expected to be talking about whisky and bedbugs while we were looking at astronomy. Thank you for your contributions.
Witnesses: Adam Woodcraft and Justin Byrne.
Q104 Chair: I welcome our next panellists. Adam Woodcraft deals with research and operations at QMC Instruments. Justin Byrne is the head of Earth observation and science at Airbus Defence and Space. Welcome to both of you. Mr Woodcraft, how successful are UK companies such as QMC at winning contracts for astronomical instrumentation to be placed on international missions and programmes?
Adam Woodcraft: I start with the caveat that I don’t have the broad view that many of your witnesses have had. I just know the fairly niche area of astronomy that I work in. Certainly, in that area, there is very little scope for industrial contracts for the specific astronomy aspects. Those are normally done as international collaborations with universities and Government labs, bringing their own funding. We certainly have had some large contracts for astronomy, but they are few and far between.
Q105 Chair: Mr Byrne, how does Airbus interact with international missions, when we are considering astronomical instruments?
Justin Byrne: The astronomy missions tend to be worldwide anyway, because they are trying to do something that has never been done before. Often it is either ESA or NASA or, quite often, both together. The science and academic teams set the science goals, and assess them to see whether they are really world leading and will really make a breakthrough. Industry’s job is then to assess whether they are feasible. We look at how they could be built and how much they would cost. Then we bid. It is a competitive environment. We are bidding against other countries in Europe, and the Americans. We are often collaborating, so it is a mixed model.
For the UK to be successful we need strong skills and strong academic links, which we have. We need access to cutting-edge technologies, because astronomy missions always push a bit beyond that. We need access to the global supply chain as well. Our heritage in the UK is doing some amazing missions. You spoke to Professor Wright before. We did the James Webb space telescope with her, as well as the solar orbiter and other missions. We have demonstrated that we are world-class in astronomy in the UK.
Q106 Chair: We wouldn’t naturally associate Airbus with Earth observation. How big a sector is that within Airbus?
Justin Byrne: In the UK we have 12,000 people working at Airbus and space is about 25% of that, so it is a big element. You have to recognise that the global space market is forecast to double by 2030. A quarter of the world’s telecommunications spacecraft are built in the UK, and in the science, exploration and astronomy arena we are world-class in the UK, as well.
Q107 Chair: With 25%, we are talking about several hundred—300-odd people; sorry, what was the figure you gave?
Justin Byrne: It was 12,000.
Q108 Chair: Oh, 12,000—so it is 3,000.
Justin Byrne: We have 12,000 direct employees in the UK and around 79,000 indirect employees—people who work on Airbus projects in the UK.
Q109 Chair: From the public’s point of view sometimes there is a difficulty in linking what happens in subjects like astronomy to their everyday experience and lives. There is sometimes a perceived disconnect between them. How big a subject matter is Earth observation for Airbus?
Justin Byrne: We operate Earth observation spacecraft all over the planet. We are exporting that globally. We are doing both science and dual use, with many applications. In the fundamental technology in astronomy, the telescopes looking out to space are actually very similar to the telescopes looking down on Earth. A lot of the investment we do in astronomy pushes the technology forward, and then we repurpose it for Earth observation, and for some of our telecommunication satellites. Even with our military satellites there is a lot of commonality, with common themes and technologies. Investing in one benefits the other. Obviously, we are here to grow the economy and jobs, and we spin all those technologies across all our sectors, to maximise their benefit.
Chair: Thank you very much. I am going to turn to my colleagues now, starting with Katherine Fletcher.
Q110 Katherine Fletcher: Gentlemen, thanks very much for your time. We appreciate it. Mr Woodcraft, what is your experience, apart from being super clever and generating really interesting business, of the links between academia and industry? What can we do to make sure that the links stay strong, to help the commercialisation of pure research?
Adam Woodcraft: It is a good question. Again, I wouldn’t claim to have any broad overview. From my experience, our company has very strong links. We came out of a university group. We are still embedded in the group. We work with them every day, and help each other out. The best way to have a connection with a group is, essentially, by being part of it.
There are lots of very good schemes around to get things going. The STFC has its industrial partnership scheme, which I was on the panel for. It was a privilege because it had enough money to fund everything that was worth funding, which is not common in STFC. We saw a huge variety of amazing ideas for things you could do with astronomy. I don’t know what became of any of them, but we funded some very interesting-looking things.
Again, this is just what I have personally come across: the Royal Society of Edinburgh has enterprise fellowships. I know someone who had one, and it was very good in terms of taking an academic and teaching them what they needed to make their spin-out but then stay in academia.
Q111 Katherine Fletcher: Is that separate from the ESA BIC that we have just heard about?
Adam Woodcraft: Yes. I have certainly seen some very good schemes for getting the link going. As for how they proceed, I couldn’t tell you.
Q112 Katherine Fletcher: What was the best one you heard?
Adam Woodcraft: There was one to make solar ovens for less developed countries. It was something totally wacky that would be really cheap and help people to cook food. It’s not just astronomy. The panel is for anything that STFC funds. I forget what it came out of.
Q113 Katherine Fletcher: Effectively, concentration of a beam of energy.
Adam Woodcraft: Yes. It was cheap. Where that went I don’t know, but it was interesting.
Q114 Katherine Fletcher: That does sound interesting. You touched on this in terms of funding, but what is the support like for SMEs in competing for astronomy contracts? You paint a good picture, but I would love to understand a bit more what that looks like, practically.
Adam Woodcraft: Again, very little of our work is actually for astronomy. It is mostly taking what is done for astronomy and putting it in other areas. We bid for contracts. We bid for very large contracts for a major part of weather satellites. We go down to things where there is a bid for, say, less than €100,000. If there is support out there for that sort of work I don’t know where I would find it. We just get on with it.
Q115 Katherine Fletcher: Fine. You are not getting lead generation support, or bid writing support, or—
Adam Woodcraft: No. Writing bids is not straightforward but it is generally fairly clear what is needed. To touch on something mentioned earlier, where we get absolutely no support is export control. As was mentioned, some of this is dual-use technology. There seems to be no support whatsoever for SMEs. If you want to work out whether you need an export licence, it is made very clear that you have to look up the legislation, look everything up, and figure out for yourself whether it is needed. You put in an application for a licence and eventually get a letter saying, “Not needed.”
That is the other problem; the timescales are very long, typically three months. We recently had to wait six months to find out if we could export. Fortunately, we have a unique technology and the customer had to wait. Otherwise, they would have gone elsewhere. From talking to colleagues in other countries, they have timescales more like a few weeks. There is also a perception that the UK is more zealous in saying no. I fully appreciate that it is the Government’s responsibility to decide what we can and cannot export, and we have no issue with that, but if we are to get on and make money from things we can export, it would be very helpful if we could find out much more quickly.
Q116 Katherine Fletcher: That is very helpful. The Department for Business and Trade has a series of regional export support advisers, I understand, and you also have things like UK Export Finance. They do not feature in your world, to help facilitate the process.
Adam Woodcraft: There may be help we are not aware of, but it has never been signposted to us. If you contact the Government directly and say, “Quick query: can I export this?”, you just get told “Look it up yourself.”
Q117 Katherine Fletcher: That is very interesting. Maybe it is something we can explore slightly later, because there are things, but they are not getting to you, and that is important. Do your counterparts in other countries that report shorter timescales have anything else? Do they have on the ground relationships, or increased people or business connections? Is anywhere else in the world doing lead generation for companies such as yours?
Adam Woodcraft: I couldn’t say.
Katherine Fletcher: Okay, thank you very much.
Q118 Chris Clarkson: Mr Woodcraft, what efforts are you making to translate some of this technology, the whizzy exciting stuff you are doing, into other commercial applications? We have heard about the ovens, for example. Are you taking specific steps to repurpose some of your things for commercialisation?
Adam Woodcraft: This is what we do. We started in the ’70s as a university spin-out, doing various things. I think people still use some of our bat detectors. The one thing that really took off and that we now do exclusively is taking technology design for submillimetre astronomy, which Steve Eales mentioned in the first session as something where the UK is a world leader, and finding other applications. There are many. Some of our sales go to other fields of astronomy, generally doing experiments on the ground, looking at a spectrum of materials so that when you see one in space you know what you have actually seen. It is vast. We cover physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. The products go all over the planet, including to telescopes at the south pole, and into space. I think the furthest we have had anything go at the moment is Saturn.
Katherine Fletcher: Is that it?
Q119 Chris Clarkson: Do you get access to adequate funding streams to undertake the research to repurpose things, or do previous repurposed applications fund the next series?
Adam Woodcraft: The answer to that is yes and no. In general, as you say, our company directly funds things partly from our own revenue and also from work with academics. That has been enough to bring out new products and change products as technology changes. A big thing is that to get the sensitivity the detectors have to be cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero. We have moved from having to slosh liquid helium around to buying a cupboard like a fridge that you can plug into a wall, and it gets cold. That is quite a lot of development, and we funded it ourselves.
Another very interesting application is security screening. First, I should say, why fund astronomy rather than something else, and then get spin-outs? A fundamental aspect of astronomy is that astronomers want absolutely the best. They want to get the last few fractions of a per cent. out of everything they do and are highly successful in persuading people to give them the money to do that. The impression I get is that in Earth observing they are very interested in data continuity, but not necessarily in getting that very last bit. You end up with a lot of money going into technology that is superbly sensitive and that no one would think to fund for applications; but once you have it, you can then use it.
In the case of security screening, I am sure you have all flown and stood like this in a box. You can have a technology that is entirely passive; you are not X-raying someone or spraying radiation at them but just looking at the fact that everyone emits radiation. You just walk along a corridor. People coming into Parliament could walk down a corridor and someone looking at a screen could see the phone in their pocket or the gun in their pocket—whatever. This is potentially big, but it needs a lot of funding. We talked about schemes. There is money that comes into academia and there are schemes that industry can apply for that will fund proof of concept. This is being done as a kind of spin-off of a spin-off—a separate company set up by QMC and the university. They have a demonstrator. You can bring potential backers in. They can walk down and see how sensitive it is. They can see you sit on a chair and stand up, and see that someone has been sitting there, from the heat from it; but it is very hard to get the money to take it to a product. The assumption is, “Once you’ve shown us a product, the money will appear,” and that is not how it works out.
Q120 Chris Clarkson: Thank you very much. Speaking of cool things, Mr Byrne, I had the pleasure of going to your Stevenage site a little while back, and I want to make sure everyone knows that I’ve driven a Mars rover. I don’t think enough people know that I have driven, and broken, a Mars rover. Obviously Lewis Hamilton also broke it, so I assume I’ve done the right thing there.
How important for Airbus is the UK as a springboard in terms of your relationship with academia and being able to access the right people and funding? How important is it for Airbus as an entity?
Justin Byrne: UKSA have been working in partnership with us for many years. We have been working on a space strategy with them—the space industrial policy that was announced last week. That is helping us to create a framework for where the UK wants to be world-class at technology and skills and capability-wise. They are our main vehicle into the European Space Agency and, internationally, into NASA and other agencies around the world, so we work hand in hand with them. We go through the business cases, and justify the growth in space, the investment that we need in space, and where to focus that, and that is done fully aligned with them.
Q121 Chris Clarkson: Do you feel you have adequate connections to other parts of industry and Government and agencies such as the UK Astronomy Technology Centre?
Justin Byrne: If you look at all the missions, especially in astronomy, you cannot do astronomy without academia. It not only defines the requirements, but builds key parts of the technology of the missions. If you take a mission like LISA Pathfinder, which was measuring gravitational waves, we were trying to create a spacecraft so stable that an atom thickness of vibration could be detected. The spacecraft was built by Airbus, but of the key technology inside it, the optical interferometer came from the University of Glasgow, and the University of Birmingham built the phase meters. Only with the complete optimisation of that system did we get to the levels where you can actually measure gravitational waves, so it is a partnership with them.
On the supply chain, we have, I think, 3,900 suppliers in the UK; 50% of those are SMEs, so it is vital to encourage them, because that is really where the technology and know-how is coming from. We have to maximise both ends.
Q122 Chris Clarkson: It really is an ecosystem. Do you feel the Government properly support that?
Justin Byrne: They definitely support it from the European Space Agency side. Obviously, the money going into the European Space Agency is good. The academic side tends to get funded directly, and have more challenges, I would say. I have a bit more sympathy for the challenges they have. The Government are procuring lots of space assets, which is something we encourage. Now that we have an industrial strategy, we should get all parts of Government to implement that strategy and make sure that we have sovereign procurement in some critical procurements that are coming up. That would really develop the technology and skills capabilities onshore, and we would not be offshoring some of them to other countries.
Q123 Chair: You talked about implementing the industrial strategy. Is there a feeling that the strategy has been written and devised, but that it has now been put to the side?
Justin Byrne: No, it was only released last week. We have been working with them to try to agree on the themes and what we think the focus should be.
Q124 Chair: It has just been released, but there have been previous strategies.
Justin Byrne: The space strategy, which is the top-level umbrella, had to turn into tangibles. What is the technology that we want to be world-class in? What are the companies and SMEs that we want to develop? What direction do we want academic research to go in? We have that framework now, and we need to make sure that all parts of Government are aligned and implementing it on some of the big programmes that are coming up.
Q125 Chair: How long will it take us to know whether it has been successful?
Justin Byrne: Among some of the big procurements we have, the Skynet procurement is coming up; that is a multi-billion procurement in space.
Q126 Chair: It was coming up before the strategy. How long before we know whether the strategy is hitting everything it should?
Justin Byrne: I think you just have to look at the procurements that are coming through and check on those technologies—the investments and themes. Airbus invests about £275 million of R&D into the UK each year. Obviously, we want the Government to align that. We are aligning our investment, and it just needs to come together and be focused. We have the framework now. We just need to get on and implement it.
Q127 Chair: Thank you. Mr Woodcraft, can I go back to the technology you were describing? I take it that it detects infrared. You talked about detectors that could be used.
Adam Woodcraft: It is submillimetre or terahertz—somewhere between infrared and radio waves. It is a very niche area, which is why some areas of astronomy can benefit from other areas. Infrared astronomy has a lot of military funding. The first infrared telescopes used military detectors. Submillimetre goes the other way. There is very little industrial application, so all the work is being done in astronomy, and that now has the potential to spin out to other areas.
Q128 Chair: You sounded slightly frustrated that people are not picking up on this in the way they should. Do you think they are likely to pick up on it in other countries?
Adam Woodcraft: I don’t know. I suspect it is an international problem. It certainly is in the UK: the valley of death. There is often funding for proof of concept, and then it is over to commercial funding. It is a good question, but I couldn’t tell you.
Chair: Thank you.
Q129 Stephen Metcalfe: Good morning, thanks for joining us. Mr Byrne, you mentioned that you have 12,000 direct employees and 79,000 in the wider supply chain. Is that across the whole of Airbus or in space and astronomy-related activity?
Justin Byrne: It is Airbus in the UK.
Q130 Stephen Metcalfe: Right, and how many of those are involved in what might be described as space jobs?
Justin Byrne: Twenty-five per cent. of those are related to space.
Q131 Stephen Metcalfe: Perfect, and is that a bigger workforce here in the UK than in other parts of the world?
Justin Byrne: I run science and astronomy in France and Germany as well. They tend to have, complementary to their ESA programmes, a big national programme, and obviously on their military programmes they have very strong sovereign requirements that those contracts must be done in-country. They tend to be slightly larger, and they have other elements of space, like launchers, that they focus on. In terms of astronomy, we are at similar levels to those countries.
Q132 Stephen Metcalfe: Is the number in the UK—the 25%—likely to go up? Is it an area that is expanding?
Justin Byrne: Well, the growth of the space sector is very impressive and it is expected to double by 2030, so obviously Airbus is committed to investing in that. We invest £275 million in R&D. We are investing in the skills—STEM aspects as well—with the objective of taking these technologies and becoming world leaders, and then exploiting that globally. We don’t expect the market to grow locally so much, but around the world it will grow, yes.
Q133 Stephen Metcalfe: And are there challenges in getting a skilled workforce? Is that why you do the STEM outreach?
Justin Byrne: Yes, that is one of our big challenges. We are really focused on getting a pipeline of talent coming through for us. We are very proud to be sponsoring the STEM Discovery Centre in Stevenage. We have thousands of children arriving each year. Not only do they learn about space and science but they can go next door, as you did, and see the Mars rover in action, being tested. The Mars rover is a very good STEM subject. It has robotics and AI. It is looking for life so it has biochemistry. It is a really good topic for them to see what academic science looks like in the real world, so it is great.
Q134 Stephen Metcalfe: Fantastic. Presumably that is focused on a wide age range.
Justin Byrne: Key stages 2 and 3 for that, and then we have our outreach programme, our STEM ambassadors. We recruited about 656 graduates and apprentices last year so it is really leading to that. That is the start of our journey.
Q135 Stephen Metcalfe: Fantastic. We often talk about workforce challenges and skill shortages. No matter which inquiry we are talking about, the same topics come up. Are we any worse than France, Germany and other countries around the world? We have lowish unemployment, but we don’t seem to have the skills that align with the industries we are trying to promote.
Justin Byrne: It is the same challenge that we are all facing. We want to be a science superpower, so today everybody is encouraging STEM. The astronomy missions and Mars missions are very good vehicles to attract young engineers into the business. That is why we push that so hard, because it is the thing that inspires and captures imaginations. I think it is a very good vehicle for attracting talent from other industries.
Q136 Stephen Metcalfe: Before I move on to support for spin-outs and SMEs, on the STEM outreach stuff, as quite a large private company, do you do any research about what works and what doesn’t? You said you had the centre in Stevenage. Is that right?
Justin Byrne: Yes—the Discovery Centre.
Q137 Stephen Metcalfe: How much research do you put in? If you are going to spend a lot of money, time and effort in doing something, you want it to have the maximum impact. Who do you work with to get that information?
Justin Byrne: Universities. We have very strong relationships with 20‑plus universities. We have a big graduate apprenticeship scheme coming through. We recycle the graduates; they go back to universities as STEM ambassadors, so it is cycling knowledge around.
Q138 Stephen Metcalfe: Are you talking to educators in universities, those who teach primary school teachers, to make sure that what is actually being delivered will get a seven-year-old excited about astronomy?
Justin Byrne: As you see, the syllabus is migrating over time from just pure academic to more targeted industry, and for us there is a lot of space science now in the curriculum. My niece was building a Mars rover in her school last week. We want to see and encourage more of those things.
Q139 Stephen Metcalfe: You are a large prime. What work do you do to support the ecosystem around spin-outs and SMEs? Do you just make them aware that you exist or do you have a more active push-pull process?
Justin Byrne: In space our role is to upgrade SMEs. They tend to start off in the commercial world. Obviously, the transition from commercial to aerospace to space is difficult and we need to help them. We invest R&D with them and have them on a programme, but the real challenge, as I think someone said previously, is how they go from technology to being a major player. That is probably where we need to find other mechanisms to help them. France and Germany have bigger national programmes that enable that to happen.
Adam Woodcraft: Anecdotally, we had a large contract with Airbus for a weather satellite. There is a lot involved in taking on a contract like that. Essentially, it is enlightened self-interest, but Airbus was very supportive in telling us what we had to do to fulfil a contract and get all the paperwork right.
Q140 Stephen Metcalfe: It was a good experience.
Adam Woodcraft: It was a good experience in that way.
Q141 Katherine Fletcher: I am trying to translate the depth of knowledge you have to the average person in the street. Could both of you tell me the best thing you have heard that could be commercialised but has not been yet, starting with Mr Byrne?
Justin Byrne: We are already moving what we do in the astronomy area into other parts of space and the commercial space arena. Gaia, for example, is a billion pixel camera astronomy mission, which has enormous amounts of optics and technology that we reuse in our commercial space. It has an enormous amount of data processing; it is big data and is generating 2.5 billion pieces of information about the Milky Way. That big data analysis is exactly the same technique that we want to use to look for resources on Earth, track people movements or other things on Earth, and it is exactly the same as the medical sector wants when scanning the body to look for illnesses. Those are capabilities that it is not obvious astronomy develops, but they are there and they will be beneficial to the big data world.
Q142 Katherine Fletcher: Mr Woodcraft, what is the best one that we haven’t turned into a business yet?
Adam Woodcraft: I would go back to what I said earlier. If you could go to an airport, walk down a corridor and be security screened, it would make a large difference to a lot of people’s lives.
Q143 Tracey Crouch: Mr Byrne, do you think that Airbus Defence and Space is adequately supported by access to public funding and private finance to compete for astronomy contracts?
Justin Byrne: Through the European Space Agency, we get access to contracts. It is competitive and we have to bid and win those, so it is down to us to make sure that we have the right skills and technology. We come back to the sovereign discussion. It would be good if the UK Government, when doing big asset procurement in space, had a greater sovereign requirement so that some of the technology does not go offshore. We want to develop more capability, companies and technologies locally, and skills and jobs here. That could be looked at.
We have lots of people around the world, for example the Americans and a lot of emerging nations, who want to work with us on these missions. They are exciting and they generate STEM interest in their countries. The UK Space Agency has launched a bilateral fund. It is fairly moderate compared with what we see in other countries. That would be a good way to expand and build bridges with other countries, but we probably have to be quite strategic about the countries where we want to build those relations. Academia, industry and science is good neutral ground for doing that, so we would look for that as well.
Q144 Tracey Crouch: Can you point the Committee to any particular country or region that does it better than us? What can we learn from them?
Justin Byrne: I have managed France and Germany as well. They have complementary national space programmes equivalent to the ESA programme. That is where all the SMEs, technologies and capabilities are developed. They fly national missions and they fly bilateral missions with other countries. Only when they have upskilled the technology and got through what we were talking about before do they become competitive and make a bid for the ESA and NASA work, which is the work that brings them through that development chain.
Q145 Tracey Crouch: As a slight recut of Katherine’s question, how much importance does Airbus give to translating the technology into other purposes?
Justin Byrne: We are a commercial company and we do astronomy because it develops skills, technologies and capabilities, but we then reuse that for our commercial space business as well, so it is fundamental.
Q146 Tracey Crouch: Are you going into the bedbug market?
Justin Byrne: No.
Tracey Crouch: Thank you.
Q147 Carol Monaghan: Mr Byrne, slightly as an aside, I believe that last month Airbus purchased a large share of OneWeb.
Justin Byrne: We procured the manufacturing facilities of OneWeb in Florida. We were a part-shareholder already, but we procured the complete capability, so we have that now.
Q148 Carol Monaghan: Maybe this is something you will not be able to answer, but I would appreciate your thoughts on it. In a previous inquiry into the UK space sector we took evidence from OneWeb. They were talking about the UK’s stake in OneWeb. The representatives from OneWeb assured the Committee that it was the intention to build generation 2 satellites in the UK. Do you have any idea whether that is still the intention of OneWeb?
Justin Byrne: OneWeb has gone through an asset procurement with Eutelsat and things like that and the world has moved on. The generation 2 procurement is still being discussed but has not been finalised. What we are looking at now is whether there may be an opportunity to build the extended generation 1, because it looks like they will need more satellites. There is an opportunity to develop that in the UK. The CLEO programme that the Government launched is an opportunity for us to exploit that, so we are investigating that at the moment.
Q149 Carol Monaghan: You started your comments by saying that Airbus is very interested in Earth observation, obviously for defence. We can see why that would be the case. Is OneWeb part of that?
Justin Byrne: OneWeb is a telecommunications network, but we use some of the platform technology that we built in OneWeb in some of our Earth observation missions as well, so there are bids in to UK military at the moment, reusing some of the platform technology that OneWeb developed for surveillance for MOD, so there is a read-across between the sectors.
Q150 Carol Monaghan: Mr Woodcraft, do you want to come in on that?
Adam Woodcraft: No, that’s fine.
Carol Monaghan: You’re just listening. That’s fine. Thank you both for your contributions today. We appreciate your taking the time to talk with us this morning. That concludes our second panel.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Ian Jones and Professor Anand.
Q151 Chair: To introduce our third panel, joining us virtually is Ian Jones, CEO of Goonhilly Earth Station, and joining us in person is Professor Manesh Anand, professor of planetary science and exploration and deputy head of the School of Physical Sciences at the Open University. Welcome to both of you this morning. Professor Anand, can you tell the Committee a little about how well established you believe the UK is for analysis of extraterrestrial samples?
Professor Anand: First, thank you very much for inviting me. I see that there is a slight mistake in my name, which I am sure will be corrected. It is Mahesh, not Manesh.
Q152 Carol Monaghan: Apologies for that.
Professor Anand: No worries. To answer your question, in the UK we are lucky to have a very strong community that is well-known for its capability in analysing extraterrestrial materials. This heritage is the result of our involvement since the Apollo era, when we were one of the first few countries that had access to the Apollo samples. We started our journey then and we continue that success today.
Q153 Carol Monaghan: Do you see that in future missions the UK will still have a strong position? To start with Apollo, we were obviously looking at moon samples, but now we are far more ambitious in the types of samples in which we are interested—asteroids, meteors and so on. Is the UK still well placed for the spectrum of different samples that will be available?
Professor Anand: I would like to think so. However, there is a serious need to maintain the expertise that we have developed, as previous colleagues explained. I represent here part of the community that comes under the umbrella of planetary science. That is a small bit of astronomy. Unlike the majority of astronomy that requires telescopes and assets that are in space or somewhere else, in planetary science our research depends on very modern, cutting-edge laboratory instrumentation that is distributed across the land, because it is developed based on local know-how and expertise over decades. Therefore, it is much more challenging to maintain that level of capability, which is tensioned against local, regional, national strategies, and to make coherent use of it to maintain leadership on the world stage, which we are very much able to do, but if we do not look into renewing some of the ageing facilities and investing in many new facilities based on advances that have happened, we might not be able to maintain our leadership for very long.
Carol Monaghan: We will come to that in a bit more detail later in the session. Thank you for that. I turn to my colleagues, starting with Graham Stringer.
Q154 Graham Stringer: Professor, you say that we have world leadership. Can you expand that a little and say where your field stands in international comparison? Where are we in the pecking order?
Professor Anand: I can speak from my own experience and then perhaps broaden it out. I am sitting in front of you because I came here 20 years ago. I built my career in the UK, starting with the Natural History Museum and moving on to the Open University, where I am today. For the last 15 years I have been leading the UK community on behalf of 25 higher education institutions and over 150 individuals who are interested in doing planetary science, focusing mostly on lunar science. I started a new initiative in 2009 working together with a NASA institute based in California. Under the umbrella of that NASA-UK node, we have developed a community over the last 15 years which punches well above its weight. To give you a couple of examples, I mentioned the Apollo samples. Outside the United States, the largest amount of Apollo samples is worked on in the UK; 10% of the principal investigators of those Apollo samples are based in the UK. That is one example.
The second example is that the Open University and many other universities in the UK have been involved in almost every planetary mission that has returned samples to Earth: Stardust, Genesis, most recently Hayabusa2, OSIRIS-REx, which is a NASA asteroid sample return mission, and many others in the making. We are very well recognised for our scientific expertise and, increasingly, for our technical expertise in building miniaturised instruments that can be put on a spacecraft to make measurements either in space or in situ.
Q155 Graham Stringer: My experience on this Committee is that we always get very good answers when people are asked to express how well we do things. In what areas are we deficient, and what can we learn from other countries where they may do things better?
Professor Anand: Right at the outset, I said that there are opportunities, and that there is a serious need to look into some of these things. For me, people are our biggest asset and resource. We are talking about people who are highly skilled and highly trained. The difficulty lies in retaining that talent in the country. Over the past 10 years I have trained many PhD students who are now world leaders in their own right, but because they could not find stable jobs in the country they left. It is the same story across the land. We produce talent; they become world leaders and then we cannot keep them, because we cannot provide long-term stability. Everybody would like to have a stable life; there is something more than science, and we are not able to do that.
Q156 Graham Stringer: Two questions follow from that immediately. Is that pipeline of people with potential and talent drying up, or are people still coming forward? Why can’t we retain those people?
Professor Anand: Thankfully, I can say that the pipeline is not drying up and that is very good news. I think you heard in a previous evidence session back in January about the length of time people have in a given contract. Most research is done in a contractual manner, where on average people tend to spend three years in a place. In the first year they get to learn the ropes and in the third year they are looking for jobs. They move from one job to the next job, so after six years of doing two different jobs in a piecemeal manner they start to get a bit edgy and look for opportunities. There are opportunities elsewhere outside the UK, and space is a burgeoning sector. It is not just America and Europe any more; it is China and India. They are growing very fast, and those emerging countries present lots of opportunities to trained people. They are taking them on. The main issue is how we retain that talent by providing longer-term stability through funding.
Q157 Graham Stringer: Are there any opportunities to use the skills in this sector to exploit other areas of science and technology?
Professor Anand: Tremendous. I will give you just a few examples. I apologise if I seem too excited because that is my passion.
Q158 Graham Stringer: No, we like excitement.
Professor Anand: Great. By chance, if any of you are interested in holding a piece of the moon I have brought it for you. What gives us the way in is the fact that we work on planetary bodies that are easily visible. Every time you take evidence in this area somebody will mention the moon. We think that because we have been to the moon we know everything about it, but we could not be more wrong.
We are returning to the moon big time. All of you must have heard about NASA’s commercial lunar payload services programme. Unfortunately, the first two missions in that series have not been completely successful. One did not quite make it; the other made it all the way but at the final moment it did not quite land. The point is that many of the developments and innovations needed to launch those missions and make them successful are equally applicable. My colleague Taff Morgan would not be sitting here had it not been for the Rosetta mission he worked on, which allowed him to develop an instrument for a space application that was later turned into many other applications that you have heard about.
The latest example I have for you is the use of microwave technology, the same microwave that probably most of you have used in your kitchen. We are experimenting with using the same microwave energy for processing material on the surface of the moon or of Mars to extract resources and manipulate materials so that you can build tools and habitat. If you bring that same technology to a terrestrial case, you could imagine loads of applications, especially in cases where there is hazard. Imagine that suddenly there is an earthquake or some natural disaster and you need to rebuild quickly and robotically using new technology. It could have a huge application. What we need to do is not just look outward for what we can do in space, but use some of the technologies that we are forced to develop, because space is a resource-constrained place. From those learnings we can bring them immediately to Earth for the benefit of society in the near term.
Q159 Graham Stringer: I think that in your opening remarks you implied that some of the kit we currently use is coming to the end of its life. Can you be more specific about what kit needs to be replenished and whether there are likely to be resources to replace that kit?
Professor Anand: Some of the instruments are highly specialised. One of them is called secondary ion mass spectrometry. We have one of those at the Open University; we have another in Edinburgh. Both pieces of equipment are now more than 15 years old. The instrument at the Open University is the one that I used to contribute to the discovery of water on the moon. You may have heard about water on the moon; we had a small role to play. The reason why we could play that small role is that we had access to the Apollo samples and the latest technology here in the UK. What we need to do now is take the advancement we have made in the past 10 years in this area to the next level. There are newer instruments that are more capable of doing other things that we would like to do when newer samples are returned, so we need to replace that kind of set-up. It is not just at the OU or Edinburgh; it is at various other universities.
What we need is capital investment. That capital investment has to be big enough so that a community can come together and bid for the right set of equipment that can be properly distributed across the country, utilising local expertise for that type of laboratory analysis. There is no point in putting an instrument where there is no local expertise. That is really needed. It takes a few years; it cannot be done overnight. There needs to be a strategy. We as a community came together and submitted a document to the STFC advisory panel making a case for that. It was considered. It is in there, so all I am doing is highlighting the need. If we don’t take action, in a few years’ time we may not be where we are today.
Graham Stringer: Thank you very much.
Q160 Stephen Metcalfe: Mr Jones, Ian, it is good to see you again. Could you tell us about the role that Goonhilly Earth Station currently plays in various aspects of space, in particular deep space missions?
Ian Jones: Indeed. Goonhilly was originally built in the 1960s, right at the beginning of the space age, by the GPO, which became British Telecom. It is now in private hands and has undergone somewhat of a revival in the last few years. We have about 60 different antennas on the site all pointing at different spacecraft in space doing various tasks. We help to communicate with geostationary satellites providing communication services. We support low orbiting satellites providing Earth observation work to the planet. We enhance GPS services.
Our great claim to fame is that we are the world’s only private company operating a deep space antenna. It is an old legacy communications antenna that was built 40 years ago. We have repurposed it and changed all the electronics and the technical equipment inside. We are now able to support missions going off to the moon, to Mars and around the solar system. We provide that capability both to space agencies and to private companies. It has enabled Goonhilly to attract a lot of inward investment to the region and to the UK.
Q161 Stephen Metcalfe: That’s brilliant. In terms of those deep space missions, what are you currently working on, or is it classified?
Ian Jones: No, we work mainly through the European Space Agency at the moment. Our background is to provide services to missions such as Gaia and Mars Express, as well as through relationships between space agencies. Every day, we support the Indian space agency mission called Aditya-L1. It is a science probe that sits in a gravity balance between the Earth and the sun. The front face of Aditya points towards the sun and does experiments on the sun. During the daytime it beams the data back to Goonhilly and we provide it to Gaia.
Just a couple of weeks ago, we helped the Intuitive Machines moon lander to land on the moon. Goonhilly was the primary ground station for that. We have supported other NASA missions. We supported the Artemis I mission to the moon. We supported the Japanese space agency Hayabusa2 sample return mission. We helped the Indian space agency land their Chandrayaan-3 lander on the moon last year.
Q162 Stephen Metcalfe: Fantastic. Forgive my ignorance; are you able to do more than one mission at a time? Can you use the antenna at different times of the day for different projects?
Ian Jones: Very occasionally. It is a bit like looking through an optical telescope. If you are looking at Jupiter through an optical telescope, you might be able to see the moons of Jupiter in the same view. Occasionally, it is possible to have two spacecraft in one view, but for 99.9% of the time one dish is dedicated to one mission. When we do the deep space work, because the earth rotates every day, different objects come and go in the sky. We see the moon rising and setting every day. We see Mars rising and setting every day. Ideally, we need to have ground stations dotted around the world. The minimum would be three ground stations, and then as the missions come and go we can have antennas pointing at them.
Q163 Stephen Metcalfe: Excellent. Do you have any plans to be the provider of those three ground stations?
Ian Jones: Yes, absolutely. Last year, we expanded our company. We bought facilities in the United States, so we now have capabilities on both the east and the west coast of the United States. We have also been expanding into Australia. That would give us the three stations, separated by 120 degrees, that would mean that we could meet the requirements of the international community, particularly organisations going back to the moon.
Q164 Stephen Metcalfe: Fantastic. If I may, can I bring you back a bit more locally? How do you as Goonhilly Earth Station work with other parts of the astronomy network both nationally and, because there is now a growing space cluster there, in Cornwall? What role do you play in that?
Ian Jones: We work very closely with a number of universities in the astronomy field, particularly the small group of universities that were involved in getting the Square Kilometre Array project established in the UK at the same time as we were establishing Goonhilly as a company. That relationship, led by the late Professor Steve Rawlings in the early 2000s, really helped to get us off the ground. It also helped to establish the international headquarters of the SKA in Manchester.
Radio astronomy and the commercial world of satellite communications share a lot of capabilities; we both use antennas and we both use radiocommunication equipment. We differ in some of the jargon and the language that we use as well as some of the techniques that we use. In working with the radio astronomy community over this last period, we have found that they have developed techniques in radio astronomy that have been long forgotten in the communications world. We use those techniques, for example super-cooled receivers, and they make our antennas incredibly sensitive. That is what enabled us to compete in the deep space communications world.
Stephen Metcalfe: Fantastic. I think that is probably it for now. Thank you.
Q165 Tracey Crouch: Mr Jones, before I ask my question about local relationships, I want to follow up on your answer to Stephen about your work with the Indian space agency. Is that something that is UK Government funded via you to then support them?
Ian Jones: Actually, no, but it raises some really interesting questions about how the work of international space agencies impacts on industry back in their own country. Generally speaking, space agencies sponsor and procure capabilities from their own country. The Indian space agency built their Chandrayaan and Aditya missions from their own industry. Rarely will space agencies buy technology internationally if they can at all help it.
For companies like Goonhilly to be able to work with the Indian space agency, we have to have a bilateral agreement with our home space agency. In this particular case, our home space agency is the European Space Agency. There was a bilateral between ESA and India. There are some commercial arrangements between ESA and the Indian space agency, and then we are contracted by ESA to provide that service for India.
I mentioned that we supported Intuitive Machines for their mission to the moon. That was a private mission funded by Intuitive Machines, but it carried a NASA payload. NASA funded Intuitive Machines to get some payload to the moon’s surface. That essentially provided Intuitive with the funding that it needed to carry out its mission, and we had a private arrangement between ourselves and Intuitive Machines, so it was able to procure our services privately. We are a commercial organisation. We sell those services.
We would very much like for the UK to have direct relationships with other nations, and we are in some detailed discussions now with the UK Space Agency about how we can do that, and how the UK can have direct bilateral arrangements with other space agencies. It would bring huge benefits to the UK if we were able to do that. It would mean that we are not then in a competition with other European providers of services. It would also mean that the UK can do what we in the space industry call barters; instead of money changing hands between Governments, we agree to swap projects. Goonhilly could provide services to NASA for its future missions, for example, and in return NASA would fly a UK project into space.
Q166 Tracey Crouch: Brilliant, thank you. Before I turn back to my original questions about local relationships, Professor Anand, do you have anything to add on the direct relationship between countries and agencies?
Professor Anand: I support what Ian has just said, although there are a few examples where the UK Space Agency has provided support for some bilaterals, especially with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency. We have also provided some instruments to previous Indian Chandrayaan missions, but that went through the ESA, European Space Agency, route. Rather than doing this in a piecemeal way, we need a much broader landscape with firm backing from our own space agency to say, “Look, we are going to do this.”
Ian talked about bartering. One day I expect that some bartering would be that new samples that were returned would also be brought back to the UK community to work on. That could be part of the mix. I support what Ian said.
Q167 Tracey Crouch: Perfect, thank you. Mr Jones, I am very familiar with Mount’s Bay, particularly the other side of the peninsula, so I completely recognise the challenges of the geography, the transport links and everything else. I appreciate that a question about what work you are carrying out with schools and colleges to foster engagement in astronomy may be quite difficult, given where you are located. None the less you are a very important part of the space ecosystem in terms of inspiring youngsters into the field and I would be really interested to hear how you are gathering interest in local schools and colleges.
Ian Jones: Indeed. We are right at the very far south tip of the UK on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, as far away from the bulk of the population of the UK as you could probably get. Having said that, it is a beautiful region and one of the most visited parts of the country by tourists, particularly in the summer.
How do we engage? Just last week, as I am doing now, we appeared online. We did an online engagement with almost 200,000 students. It was Mars Day last week, and we worked with the European Space Education Resource office’s UK branch STEM outreach organisation and beamed images from Mars directly via Goonhilly to 200,000 students. We are able to do that sort of thing.
We also run what we like to think of as very special education outreach engagements. We work with year 10 students and year 12 students on summer schools, which came out of the fact that when we were a tiny company we would get lots of students doing their work experience week asking if they could have their work experience with us. We could never tell from one week to the next what we would be doing, so we decided that we would either make a go of it or do nothing, and we decided that we would invite a lot of students in and give them a space summer school. Our experience of doing that for several years is that it is a game-changing experience.
We use two words. One is “inspiration” because Goonhilly has huge antennas that communicate across the solar system to different spacecraft. It is very inspiring. “Aspiration” is the key thing. For students, being able to see the space industry in action, to see astronomy and space science in action and realise that they can do it themselves is the thing that quite often persuades them to decide which A-levels to take and which university degree to study. Quite often, we have been able to inspire young people to get into the space industry.
Q168 Tracey Crouch: Just out of interest, is there a gender difference in interest?
Ian Jones: It is interesting. The heritage of Goonhilly is from the satellite communications side of things. Our future is in what is often termed space 2.0; it is more about exploration and using space to help us support life on Earth. I would say that there is equal interest among young people. When I travel internationally to conferences, the traditional satellite communications business is populated by people who look like me, with no hair and close to retirement, but all of the interest in what you can do in space now to look after the planet and to explore the solar system is very much a young person’s industry and there is a cross-section of the demographic. It is fantastic to see.
Q169 Tracey Crouch: Do you have a visitor centre?
Ian Jones: There was a visitor centre at Goonhilly. The visitor centre building is still in place. As an SME, as a private company, we have not found the ability to invest in reopening the visitor centre. We had to concentrate on the very difficult task of becoming an international player in the space communications market. It is something that we would very much like to get open again, but we do not feel that as a company that is our remit to do, so we would love to find partners to do it with.
Q170 Tracey Crouch: Thank you. Professor Anand, what is your experience of outreach, particularly with younger school-age children? I would be really interested to hear what you are doing.
Professor Anand: Sure, thank you so much. This is something that I am most passionate about, to the extent that I started an outreach programme called “Living on the Moon”. Everybody here can have a sticker. Why did I call it “Living on the Moon”? Because in 2019 on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing we thought that as a community, the entire UK community that I already mentioned I co-ordinate, we would come together and put out a set of hands-on engagement activities for anybody—five-year-olds to 95-year-olds. Age is no barrier. In that process, you share the excitement, the enthusiasm and the possibility of developing skills and getting education. The idea was to engage, enthuse and inspire. If we can do that, the rest takes care of itself.
The very first thing we did was to go to the Royal Society summer science exhibition in London—thankfully, our application was accepted—and we interacted with about 10,000 visitors. We realised that London is not the only place and it is probably the more privileged people who get a chance to go there. Being from the Open University, there is no better cause; our social mission is to get education to as many people as possible. We have footprints in all four nations.
I started a tour of all the nations. I went to Wales. I went as a lecturer to the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, RSGS, almost four years ago to the day. I remember coming back from that trip and everything else was happening—you know what I mean. While I was driving across the southern part of Scotland, which is not as visited as some other parts of Scotland, I ended up in a place called Dumfries. A lady came to me at the end of my talk and said, “Did you know that Neil Armstrong had a connection to this area?” To my embarrassment, I did not. I said, “Could you please tell me what it is?”, and she said, “It’s not far from here. It’s about 10 or 20 miles from here. There is a place called Langholm where the Armstrong clan comes from. Why don’t you go and check it out?”
The next day the very first thing I did was visit that place, and I still very proudly wear my Armstrong badge of honour. Once I visited that place, I found that lots of tourists, especially from America, visited there, but people in my own community, scientists, were unaware of the link. Then and there, I decided that I would bring the international lunar community to Dumfries in Scotland. I wanted to do it the following year, but of course there was the pandemic and all.
You will be pleased to hear that this June we will be bringing almost 200 international experts from all over the world, all the way from Hawaii to Australia, to Dumfries not just for a scientific meeting but for a dedicated school day where we will bring 200 children from local communities, who probably are under-served and do not learn much about space, to spend a day with experts to learn what they can do if they follow STEM. I can go on and on about the outreach and public engagement. We also use the vehicle of our partnership with the BBC. You are aware that we make programmes. We made a programme called “8 days: To the Moon and Back” in 2019. It got 3 million views. “The Planets” and “The Universe” got 28 million views. The programmes that we make are reaching those parts of the community that otherwise do not get a chance to experience this. It is really important.
That is why, when Graham asked me about the pipeline drying, I can emphatically tell you that that is not the case. We have a lot of enthusiasm right from primary school to secondary school to university. We need to capture that talent and capitalise on it and be more inclusive. I have so many discussions. I have heard much discussion about the gender balance, but on diversity we are just starting. It is not just gender balance. There is so much diversity in our community that we need to tap into. I will stop there.
Tracey Crouch: Thank you very much.
Chair: Thank you, Tracey. Finally, James Davies.
Q171 Dr Davies: On to artificial intelligence and, first, Professor Anand. What use does planetary science make of AI so far?
Professor Anand: A huge amount. We collect a huge amount of data from the spacecraft missions that are going around planets. We have missions that are going around the moon and Mars. There is a mission that is on its way to Mercury. It has been 10 years in the making, so we as a UK community are looking forward to that. When that data comes back, so far it has been individuals sitting in front of their computer downloading the data and looking through it—just the first cut through. Now, we are using AI to do the first pass and identify some of the important and interesting bits so that then a human can pick that up and maximise the output from it. That is one example.
The other use of artificial intelligence in planetary missions is that when spacecraft are around those bodies they have to take some autonomous decisions based on the data they collect there. Part of it is what did not work for Intuitive Machines and why it was not successful, but this is the development and this is where things are going. The future will be very much robotics/AI driven with human involvement. That is how I see AI being used.
Q172 Dr Davies: Really good, thank you very much. Turning to Ian Jones, Professor Anna Scaife told the Committee that AI was going to be important in terms of processing and making sense of the large quantities of data that arise through astronomy. Do you think that Britain is well placed to take advantage of that?
Ian Jones: I certainly do. The scientific community really understands AI and has a real need to get to the bottom of the useful information, particularly as developed in the radio astronomy community. In order to look back to the beginning of the universe, you need to collect a huge amount of data and process that data—in fact, more data than is currently moving around the world on the global internet. It is important to be able to narrow down the required information from that, and the UK has a great capability in understanding how that is done.
We tend to think of AI as a modern invention, but its roots go back a couple of hundred years and the logic and the mathematics that we use. In the communications field, we use a similar but related capability; you could call it digital signal processing. We use digital signal processing for many purposes—to make our mobile phones work and to communicate with satellites. It works on very narrow amounts of data, and processes that data very deterministically, but uses the same bedrock of mathematics. In the UK, we have the ability to do both of those.
To give you an example, if you were collecting huge amounts of data from the universe and you wanted to determine a process that was going on to form a galaxy or whatever, AI would be a fantastic tool to use. If you wanted to do an international financial transaction, and you wanted to buy something online from America, you absolutely would not want to use AI. You would want to use digital signal processing and make sure that the amount that you put on the form on the website was the amount of money that was taken from your bank, and you would want absolutely zero chance of there being an error. Currently, AI does not give us that, but we have other tools like the digital signal processing that we are really good at in the UK that can do that. We have the ability to do both.
Q173 Dr Davies: In terms of AI, how are SMEs in this country such as yours able to exploit the opportunities?
Ian Jones: It is an interesting point. There are the online services that everybody is coming to understand and to use. That is a process that we all need to learn about and get better at understanding. It will come across the board for companies. If we look at the technology companies that can use AI to make a significant difference in the economy in the UK, we probably need to do more interaction with universities. A lot of the development is done in the academic sector at the moment. There is a real challenge to see how those techniques can be rolled out more broadly across industry.
We will be using AI for surveillance of space and doing a lot of data processing to try to find out where space debris and satellites are in space. We will be processing very large amounts of data and low contrast, low signal-to-noise data, but we will also be using the techniques of digital signal processing.
Q174 Dr Davies: You said that the challenges that exist can be overcome in part through better liaison with universities. Are there any other challenges that you see or solutions that you want to highlight?
Ian Jones: A lot of UK money is going into the university sector, quite rightly, at the moment. The Alan Turing Institute and the funding that is going in to create AI specific data processing data centres is all good, and that should be done. What could be done better are programmes that allow technology and manufacturing industries in particular to gain access to the research and development that is being done in universities.
We have heard a lot in evidence here about spin-outs from universities, but that is not the route that all technology companies use to start up. Many graduates leave the university sector and perhaps work in industry for a few years and then set up a company. Activities to get universities and academia working more closely together are a real challenge. I do not think it has been solved perfectly yet. We could do more to think about how that could be done.
Q175 Dr Davies: Professor Scaife also told us that using AI for astronomy could then lead to AI itself being trained for other purposes. Do you have any comments on the opportunities in that field and whether this country is succeeding?
Ian Jones: Radio astronomy is a massively multidisciplinary field. We use the outputs from radio astronomy for our work because the radio astronomers produce instruments that we can use that are of much better quality for receiving very faint signals or for extending the frequencies of interest that we can use. When radio astronomers have received data, they do image processing. They are often trying to extract information from very poor-quality data, so that has a massive amount of impact. We have already heard a number of witnesses talk about the implications for the medical field. Very often, the capabilities around processing of data, and that includes AI, become used in the medical field. Yes, there are many opportunities for the skillset developed in the astronomy community to move across to other sectors.
Dr Davies: Fantastic, thank you. I think the bell is about to ring for Wales questions.
Chair: It certainly is. Thank you, James, for that. I thank our two witnesses. Ian Jones, thank you for joining us virtually. Professor Mahesh Anand—apologies for getting your name wrong at the start—thank you very much for joining us. Several Committee members want to see your moon rock. Thank you. That ends today’s session.