Examination of witnesses
Lord Willetts and Dr Paul Bate.
Q12 The Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to this meeting of the UK Engagement with Space Committee. I am delighted that we have with us for this session Lord Willetts, the president of the UK Space Agency, and Dr Paul Bate, the chief executive of the UK Space Agency. Thank you so very much for joining us. We are very much looking forward to hearing from you and I must congratulate Lord Willetts on a new appointment, which I read about today.
Lord Willetts: Thank you.
The Chair: I do not see how you have time for all the things you do, but it is fantastic and I am sure everyone will benefit. I will start with the first question: in 2021 we had the national space strategy. It was the first time that we saw the bringing together of civil and military policy. Please, for all these questions, you do not both have to answer every one but, on this, I would be interested to hear from both of you. How would you summarise the progress made since the strategy was created? What has been successful and what perhaps less so? What are you still looking forward to being able to do?
Lord Willetts: I will try to answer very briefly and then Paul, the chief executive, can pick up. We had a very successful ESA ministerial where Britain played a key role and got the leadership of some major programmes. We carry on having a dynamic private space sector; if anything, it is growing into a more mixed ecosystem with lots of private players, particularly lots of start-ups and small companies. We do very well at attracting investment, especially overseas investment, where we think we are second to the US. That is the good news, and Paul can add to it.
I think the challenge—where we still have more to do—is that, while we are more closely linked to the defence and security side than we were, there is still a lot to do to make those links even better. The success of our support for all these start-ups in the ecosystem is not matched with success in scaling them up. In many ways, space is just an example of the wider British innovation problem of lots of tiddlers, but where is the accruement of the Mittelstand? Where is the growth coming from into larger companies? This is tough for us.
For us, the funding environment with a lot of one-year public expenditure settlements—and that is not the fault of any particular political party; it has just been for a variety of reasons—has made running the Space Agency efficiently harder and that is why the CSR is a great opportunity to, we hope, operate within a stable framework set for several years. Paul, would you want to add to that?
Dr Paul Bate: I echo that space is even more embedded in everyday life than it was in 2021. We see that through the level of investment. We also get around, listen and talk to each other, particularly on space and financial services around space.
David mentioned the European Space Agency Council of Ministers meeting. It is quite easy to look with hindsight and say, “Well, we had the mission leadership everywhere from the moon and to communications on earth and earth observation. Somehow that was always going to happen”, but I think it was very important that we were able to settle the UK being at the centre of European and global endeavours on space. That was something that we were very clear about going into the ministerial.
Where we have gone as an agency, under the umbrella of the National Space Strategy, has still been as that strong founding member of the European Space Agency but by having a much wider reach than we used to. Historically, the vast majority of our money was going through the European Space Agency. It comes back to the UK, but we still did not have bilateral programmes so, if we wanted to fund a space science programme and we were not doing it through the European Space Agency, it could be quite hard to work out how to support our best scientists. We now have a £20 million science and exploration bilateral fund that allows us to reach out to NASA and other US agencies, to Canada, to Japan, to Australia and beyond.
So we have seen that on the science side and in the telecommunications side, where we have a £160 million programme called Connectivity in Low Earth Orbit. We adjust, as the rest of the world does, to the changing way in which space is used. There still are those big geostationary satellites, but the vast majority of communications satellites are now much closer to earth.
Some things could be even better. We have started a series of programmes that support technology but also look to the customers of space and the investors in space. I would like to see us go further in how we unlock space for the everyday economy, for Governments and for national security.
The Chair: That was fantastic. There are about 150 questions in my head now but let us move to Viscount Stansgate.
Q13 Viscount Stansgate: Thank you and good afternoon. What do you consider to be the UK’s global competitive advantages in space, at the moment? What do we do better than other countries? Then I will have a supplementary to follow.
Lord Willetts: I will start and again hand over to Paul. First, as with much other science innovation, we—because we do not have great big heavy rockets and unlimited budgets and massive security requirements—are small, nimble, flexible and can often do things at a significantly lower cost than other countries. We are very innovative in thinking of smart ways of doing things with smaller satellites, Surrey Satellite Technology being the original spin-out that led the move to small satellites. That is a strength.
Secondly, we have incredibly good science and, as Paul said, we have a lot of international partnerships. That is partly driven by the fact that, around the world, almost every major science community that would love to do space starts with our scientists. There is an endless appetite—judged by others, not ourselves—to work with our scientists because they are very good. That is another great asset.
Thirdly, if I may say so—and it is easier for me because I do not have an executive role at the Space Agency—I think the model of our space agency is that we are smaller. We are significantly smaller than the French or German and many other national agencies. They have massive numbers of technical staff literally designing programmes and sometimes even kit for national requirements. That is not the British model: we work a lot through ESA, and we are an enabler with one of our key objectives being to promote private sector activity. The British mix is distinctive: a smaller public sector agency and a larger private sector role. We try to crowd them in, not crowd them out by doing stuff ourselves.
Dr Paul Bate: I will double down on how important it is to be commercially facing, because the success in the space sector in the next 10 to 20 years will not be from the things that have been successful for the last 50 or 60 years. As David said, the fact is that we are not encumbered by a heavily institutionalised focus but, at the same time, we have a really strong regulatory framework from the Space Industry Act 2018 and we have the City as well. There are things that both entrepreneurs and sources of capital are looking for—stability, great science, good engineering and the ability to bring in capital. They all make a big difference.
I wouldn’t want the committee to think that that just means it is only the peripheral stuff that makes a difference; we are also world leading in particular niches of space. The so-called high-end payloads, the highly software-defined satellites and the ability to use complex satellite communication from companies like SatixFy are pulled on globally, when we are looking at this emerging economy in orbit and particularly around in-orbit servicing.
There are companies such as D-Orbit, Astroscale, Orbit Fab, and ClearSpace, and we often hear from their chief executives. The chief executive of Astroscale—which is a Japanese company with over 200 people in the UK now—tells a story of how he went around at least a dozen countries looking for somebody, anybody, who would work with him to deorbit satellites to extend their life. It was the UK that did not say no and said, “We will work with you, and we will find a way”. Now Astroscale is part of a number of missions with us.
Viscount Stansgate: We have been given some figures that suggest that the UK’s global market share in space has gone down from about 5% in 2020 to about 4% last year or the year before. Would it be fair or unfair to say that it looks as though we are moving backwards?
Lord Willetts: I think that is unfair. Our reading is that we are on about 5% of a very rapidly growing global economic sector. It would be wonderful if we were on 10% but we are working hard to keep it at about 5%. There are several different measures. According to some, we are at 4.2% and to some we are at 5.1%. I would say that about 5% is as far as we can reliably go.
The key thing is that space is now at sort of an inflexion point. The cost of launch has fallen dramatically—by 90%. The capacity to pack a lot of powerful electronics into a small satellite has also grown enormously. There are forecasts that, therefore, the global space economy could double or triple in size; it could double by 2030 and keep on going. Even modestly, just keeping up 5% is a fantastic economic opportunity for the UK because it is so rapidly growing. The space sector in the UK is growing at a substantial real rate per year.
Viscount Stansgate: Like the universe, space is expanding.
Q14 Baroness Mobarik: Lord Willetts, you have previously said that space should be given a proper role in future defence strategy. I think you alluded to it earlier. Can you highlight how a strong space economy underpins national security and resilience?
Lord Willetts: Let me think of some examples, and again Paul can add. To take one case, we still have OneWeb headquartered in the UK. When people think about nightmare scenarios of cables being cut, limiting the conventional means of transmitting data, space—although its capacity is still small compared with physical cables—and the rapid emergence of LEO constellations is a substitute that could carry on functioning even if a cable were lost. There is now the Apple advertisement: do not think about mobile phone coverage; wherever you are in the world, if it is an emergency, you can use space-based communication to use your Apple iPhone. I hope that is not too commercial a point about one brand for this distinguished committee.
So there is that. We are very close to having an autonomous UK launch capability on UK soil, which is another great asset. You could argue that, through OneWeb, we also have a LEO constellation that functions. It could do more, but it functions.
For earth observation, because we engage with Copernicus, if there is a flood anywhere in the UK, we get very reliable imagery and know exactly where it is and what the problems are. There are lots of ways in which it is a part of critical national infrastructure.
Dr Paul Bate: The UK Space Agency is a civil space agency and organisation. On the military side, there is the SKYNET programme and the so-called ISTARI programme, looking at both satellite communications for our war fighters and earth observation, intelligence and surveillance.
We also look at the threats from space, not particularly from nefarious actors but from solar storms. At the moment, every observation that we have of a solar flare is coming because we are looking directly at the sun with our satellites or ground-based equipment, which only gives us a few hours’ warning at best. If those solar flares are really strong, they can knock out entire power grids. We saw that recently with the aurora, beautiful though it was; it caused some substantial challenges, particularly in North America.
One of the programmes that we have invested in, which we lead for the European Space Agency but working with US agencies, is to build the next generation of solar weather satellites. Without going into all the technical detail, it is a spacecraft that, instead of sitting between the earth and the sun, sits off to the side. The side of that axis is before the sun has turned and is facing the earth. We get much more information by tracking the sun before it has turned round. If we are preparing our power grids that is invaluable to ensure that we have continuity of electricity, should there be a major solar event.
Lord Willetts: These events come in cycles about every 11 or 12 years. The last cycle peak was about 2012. One of our top half-dozen risks for the London Olympics was solar activity, which would mean that all communications around the London Olympics would be closed down. That does make you realise how vulnerable we potentially are, and why we need the kind of investment that Paul was describing.
The Chair: That was a well-kept secret.
Q15 Lord Booth-Smith: Given that our key measure of success is encouraging greater income and investment—you have touched on this by referring to being very commercial-facing—could you elaborate a little bit on how UKSA is seeking to generate that new investment? Thinking about recent endeavours, how successful do you believe you have been?
Dr Paul Bate: We look at a group of different measures and metrics for our own success. When we looked at it three years ago, we did not have a way of understanding the amount of revenue and capital that was flowing into the UK space sector as a result of what we had been doing. We have started to measure that. For what it is worth, that is what we call our north star metric and we are already seeing that the payback is there.
However, space is quite a long-term endeavour, so we can either wait 10 years and see just how much that grant from 2025 affected us in 2035, or we can look prospectively and do the economic analysis on what we are seeing. We did that for our entire European Space Agency portfolio and we found that, for every pound invested, £9.80 was flowing back to the UK after all the overheads were considered.
We could also ask companies, rather than it being the agency saying that the agency thinks it is doing okay. We can ask the likes of Satellite Vu, Open Cosmos, Oxford Space Systems or Space Forge. All these companies in which we have invested on behalf of the taxpayer typically grant R&D money. We can ask them what that investment has catalysed. They are very clear—and we look at these case studies quite carefully—that their ability to raise money on the capital markets, or sometimes from their parent company, is dependent on the relatively small amounts of investment that we have put into them to support their technology raising. We are quite confident at a company level as well as on the portfolio.
Lord Booth-Smith: Many industries—particularly ones with high growth potential—will often see a plethora of, I guess, ancillary or professional services support around them. I am particularly thinking about boutique investment analysis and analysts operating around it. A previous evidence session highlighted that there are relatively small-scale VC funds operating in this space, which are bespoke for it, but have you noticed any of that growth around the industry? I am thinking in particular of analysts around investment, boutique funds.
Dr Paul Bate: We are seeing more boutique funds and space-focused funds. One of the first was Seraphim Space, which was invested in by the British Business Bank. We also see others such as Type One Ventures, Future Planet Capital and others coming into space within the UK. We are also seeing companies within the UK and more broadly being invested in by larger players.
It is quite challenging, particularly for venture capital—let alone private capital or private equity as well—because they have an exit strategy and space often has longer timescales before the cash starts to flow. I guess the biggest difference we have seen is in the amount of deal flow, which is definitely increasing. What we want to see happen more now is larger deals so that we can properly scale up the industry.
Lord Willetts: This ties in with things like the Mansion House agenda. To be frank, both Paul and I put a lot of effort into going to City investment conferences trying to persuade people that space is not some scary, totally esoteric area. If an investment pension fund wishes to invest in key technologies, they should have space as part of their portfolio. We are working at it but we would love to make more progress.
Q16 Lord Tarassenko: This question is almost entirely related to that as satellites—as I am sure you are telling them—are becoming a general-purpose technology. So this is about how good a front door your agency is, and maybe even the Satellite Applications Catapult is, to people who are interested in some of what space technology can help them with now: for example, satellite communications; position navigation timing for financial transactions and so on—we might talk about the resilience of later; and earth observation for climate change and other purposes.
More and more people are beginning to understand that the data that satellites provide is incredibly useful. How much of that is available through ESA and how much is available through the Satellite Applications Catapult? If I am one of these companies wanting to use space and its data, where do I go in this country? How efficient are you at opening the right channels for them?
Lord Willetts: You come to the space agency. Our whole aim is to be a friendly and accessible open door. The tricky issue, which we may come to, is a kind of buying power. We do not have enormous buying power. Across government, there are lots of departments that are already using space-based services and may not even realise that they are. They may just be passively buying something off Google or whatever without thinking of what the options are.
If I may say so to committee, although of course the Space Agency is under the sponsorship of DSIT—that is fine and we understand that—we see ourselves as offering a service across government. Some of the people who approach us are keen to sell to the Government. A contract with a government body of some sort is a great way of getting funded and is a great tick in the box that enables them to operate elsewhere. What we keep on working at, and this committee may want to speak to some of the other departments, is trying to get departments across Whitehall to think strategically about buying space-based services.
Dr Paul Bate: That front door is the reason why we started the Unlocking Space programme. We have a stream of work for unlocking space for business and a stream for unlocking space for investors. The aim of it is just good matchmaking. A company will often come to us and say, “We have this need, and we’ve heard that we might be able to get this sort of space data or applications” but it is very difficult to navigate a sector that you are not so familiar with. We say, “Great, we can work with the Satellite Applications Catapult”. We have a catalogue of all the companies doing work in space. We can either show people that or actively put them in touch with the right companies.
There is also ongoing education, and it works both ways. Again, space companies are often phenomenal with investors, but not always, similarly in finding new customer bases. We bring the supply side, the demand side and the investor side together in a series of meetings. There will be another one this Friday with the business community. We particularly started with the financial services and transport sectors, because we recognise those as two particular verticals that had space demand. We want to make sure that we understand those barriers and that we do the things that only a space agency can do and then get people together so they can do the things that only a business and a customer can do together.
Lord Willetts: Sometimes what they want is a first contract from government to help them develop a service. The current rules are pretty strict: you can only pay after the service has been delivered. That means that the kind of offer that some other countries can make of paying in advance to help promote the development of a company is much harder for us to do in the UK. This is part of the explanation of this frustration we were talking about earlier with all the tiddlers, which might have had a £100,000 grant from the Space Agency, when what they would love next is a £2 million contract from someone in government. At the moment, under the rules, the Government’s line is basically that “When you are delivering the data to us, then we’ll pay for it, but we will not pay for it in advance”.
Q17 Lord St John of Bletso: I am joining from Houston, at an international energy conference. There has been mention this morning of a UK satellite business, FlareIntel, which can track every gas flare from every oilfield around the world, which is enormously helpful to those who are trying to bring our emissions down.
My question evolves more on the emergence of the in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing market. We are a leader in this market. How is the UK Space Agency supporting businesses operating in this market? In particular, I would like to hear more about what they are doing to provide support for infrastructure for space ports and others. That is my first question and I have a few supplementary questions.
Dr Paul Bate: We take the approach of making sure that the regulation is strong so that people can confidently come up close to a satellite without infringing on insurance needs or anything legislative. We have one of the most stable and forward-leaning regulatory environments in the UK, which we touched on earlier in the evidence.
We also think that it is important to be leading the way ourselves. There is an active debris-removal mission, for which all the de-risking is being carried out. Two companies, ClearSpace and Astroscale, are competing for that. That will be to remove defunct satellites from space. We support Astroscale to do the same thing for OneWeb satellites. We are there alongside them, helping them build the market.
You mentioned infrastructure. There is an in-orbit service and manufacturing facility at Westcott, in the UK, which we have recently expanded. It allows a lot of the testing to be done. When you are approaching a satellite for the first time, you cannot simulate all the microgravity environment, but a lot can be pre-simulated, which de-risks the overall mission. We ensure on the world stage that the rules of behaviour, the so-called long-term sustainability guidelines that we negotiate through the UN, are in place.
Where I would like us to go next is to get some sort of parity with the climate change world where, for all the challenges, we all know how many megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent are linked to a temperature rise of one and a half or two degrees. The truth is that, in space, while we know that the more debris there is the more dangerous it becomes, we do not know how much mass is too much or the cross section. Of course, what matters is how much is flying into something else. So we are also leading on the science of parameterising the space environment and understanding the consequences of bringing a satellite down into the earth’s atmosphere.
That is typically how satellites end their lives, particularly in low earth orbit. It is a lot safer than them being there and just polluting the space environment, but we need to understand the impact of metal particulates in the upper atmosphere. That is not well understood so we are also trying to lead the science. It is an area that we see as very important for the UK commercially, but also for future generations who are going to be even more reliant on space than we are. We need to make sure that those orbital environments are safe.
Lord St John of Bletso: Space debris is becoming a massive problem. The question I have is: who is going to provide that funding for innovative businesses in the UK that will be responsible for these services?
On the same question as who will be paying for this, what collaborations are you working on, engaging in partnerships with other international space agencies to broaden these market opportunities and to exchange best practice?
Dr Paul Bate: We are a quite important member of the United Nations effort, through the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs. However, specifically on debris co-ordination, there is the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, IADC, for which we have recently taken on the global chair role, as part of driving this work forward and doing that science that allows us to understand really what is happening.
We also want to play our part on the funding side. I mentioned a couple of those missions that we will see. A OneWeb satellite is likely to be de-orbited around 2026, through Astroscale. On a similar timescale, we are hoping, subject to the spending review, to carry out that national active debris-removal mission as well.
There are all sorts of ideas, and they are good ones, about how the world can come together and remove the objects that are currently in space, many of which—most of which—are not UK-owned. There are options around bounty schemes and insurance schemes, at which we are looking quite carefully, so that we do it in an economically efficient way.
Lord Willetts: If I may add to that, because it is a fascinating example of international diplomacy, the fact is that there is only one international treaty governing space—written in the 1960s—and in today’s environment it is very hard to see it being updated with a new fully legal equivalent to the original outer space treaty, of which, incidentally, we are a guarantor power. We are the third signatory after the USA and the USSR.
Britain did lead in the United Nations. It is a great example of soft power in getting agreed statements about the responsible use of space. That was a UK initiative. If I may say so, His Majesty the King is a great supporter of Astra Carta, which is an international standard on the responsible use of space. When he speaks at or convenes an event at Buckingham Palace or elsewhere, there is a global audience. It is a good example of the subtle use of soft power, plus the actual practical funding programmes that Paul was describing, where we are also one of the world leaders, so I think we can claim to be punching above our weight on this issue.
Q18 Baroness Donaghy: In answer to questions from Lord Stansgate, you have already indicated a partial answer to what I am going to ask. Is it possible for UKSA to become a significant customer without a significant increase in funding? You said, Lord Willetts, that you do not have enormous buying power, and you have talked about the importance of thinking strategically across government departments.
Now, we could talk about procurement in government for ever. Obviously, we would rather not, but one of the drawbacks, apart from the one that you have mentioned about being paid only after the service has been delivered, would be the issue of multi-year funding, risk aversion, and silos in different departments.
Now, it sounds to me as if you could be going around reforming Whitehall, as well as doing the job that you are doing, if you are going to bring some more focus to the kind of issues that you are using your soft power to achieve, at the moment.
Lord Willetts: Yes, it is a matter of working with us. I remember, years ago, going to pitch to the agriculture department that they were levying farmers based on the acreage—the hectares of certain crops. I said, “I bet the farmers are understating the acreage. Why don’t you use some earth observation data and tell them, work out exactly, what the acreage is and then you will collect more revenues from your levy?” That is the kind of stuff where we can pitch this more.
To be honest, it varies a lot with individual departments and often the character of the Minister or the chief scientist. You find some places that absolutely get it and are keen to be strategic in using space-based services; there are other places where you are knocking your head against a brick wall, slightly. If I may say so, exercises such as this committee have the potential just to get some busy departments to raise their sights a bit and realise that, even without an increase in their budget—just a bit of smart procurement—they could use space services more for their departmental purposes.
Dr Paul Bate: We have been testing how far we can go. I think Lord St John mentioned the ability to see plumes of greenhouse gases from space. We recently, I think about 12 months ago or so ago now, let a contract with a company called GHGSat to buy some of their historic methane emission data. It had recently spotted a methane plume outside Cheltenham that had not been known about. I think the local inhabitants were all too aware of it, but it was not understood where it was coming from and where the leak was.
We took the opportunity to work with the Satellite Applications Catapult to buy the data and make it available across government and to international methane monitoring organisations. That has worked really well, because the whole of government is able to use that data. It also happened to anchor that company in the UK, which now buys some of its satellites from manufacturers in Glasgow. We often see this sort of ecosystem start to form around contracts.
Similarly, when it comes to a sort of space-space, if you like—the deep space network that NASA and the European Space Agency run—it is really overloaded. There are a lot of satellites to track, a lot of spacecraft now around Mars and the Moon. We have one of the only commercial providers of those services in Goonhilly, in Cornwall. We let a contract with Goonhilly so that other nations, as well as us, could have access to their facilities. That has led to more tracking of Mars and of lunar spacecraft as well.
We find that, when we do it, it is very successful for the service it provides and for the anchoring it gives those customers. It will be for the Government and the different ministries to decide whether they want the agency to do more of that and pool more of that money but I hope that we are showing that we are up for it.
Baroness Donaghy: Can you do multi-year funding yourselves?
Dr Paul Bate: Yes. We are funded across a spending review. The spending review settlement that is expected later this year will be funding out to March 2030.
Q19 Lord Lansley: You talked earlier about the UK’s participation in the European Space Agency. I would like to explore a little further how you see that developing. Are you anticipating that we would increase our contributions and take more of a lead in certain programmes? What kind of relationship are you looking to form with ESA in the future?
Lord Willetts: ESA is key for us as a delivery body. Some of it is money that we put in automatically for the basic discovery science, then there are programmes that our Minister—when the Minister goes to the ESA Ministerial, roughly every two years—decides are a priority for the UK and in a negotiation, puts in our contribution. Sometimes, having worked it out in advance, potential partners who will come in with us. That can work very well; it means we get a key role in a big programme that we would not have the resource to do on our own.
To put it very crudely, our view is that being 10% of a project with 10 satellites is better than being 100% of a project with one satellite. You want to scale and build up areas where you have particular technical expertise, identify partners elsewhere in Europe that have complementary expertise and, between you, put together a bigger programme. That has historically worked for us. It is the role of any Minister coming in, preparing for ESA, to decide what their priorities are.
The other sort of tricky issue, which we just all have to find our way around—and I am looking at the chair of this committee as I say this—is that Brexit has destabilised some of these things because, in reality, ESA was the R&D arm of the EU. When the membership of ESA was pretty much the same as the membership of the EU, the EU was happy for its R&D to be done by ESA. Once you have a significant partner in ESA that is not also in the EU, that model is under greater pressure and you have to find a way through it. However, we are now talking high politics and whether any kind of defence and security pact would enable closer collaboration on space. That makes it a bit trickier.
Lord Lansley: Let me follow that up because I know these are sensitive issues. We have the European Union establishing its own agency for their own space programme alongside ESA—not literally—over in Prague. That of course has responsibility for some programmes that we used to be in, and we are now no longer in, some of which would be very useful: Galileo, EGNOS, Secure SATCOM.
Some of the things we are talking about in terms of future resilience are things being done for the European Union through those programmes. We are allowed to think these thoughts, are we not, Madam Chair? We are allowed to think whatever thoughts we think would be really useful, but surely reintegration of some of the European space programmes would be a very useful way for us to participate in some of those additional programmes that we used to be part of and, ideally, would be part of again.
Lord Willetts: Yes, and some of these are strategic decisions for Ministers but, just as a matter of history, it is the case that we lost our membership of Galileo with Brexit and the EU doctrine—someone knows it much better than I do—was partly that, because this has a security function, we are not going to have third countries delivering something that is key for EU security. Basically, a lot of the British cryptography that had been used to make this a secure system was taken out and French cryptography was substituted for it, on the grounds that we were a third party. There was nothing in our trade relationship with the EU that provided for close working on something that was a security issue.
Now, in today’s world, if you were to create a close security partnership in some way, perhaps some of the barriers and issues that pushed us out of Galileo would be dealt with. Those are high political matters.
Lord Lansley: They are not outwith the possibility of making adjustments.
The Chair: We can do whatever we like.
Lord Lansley: There are opportunities beyond ESA and beyond Europe. I wondered if you had a sense of where the particular international partnerships best lie. Are they Government-to-Government relationships or are they the UK working with commercial partners?
Lord Willetts: We have some great international partnerships and, in fact, we have been growing them in the last year. Paul, do you want to briefly summarise them?
Dr Paul Bate: We are in the fortunate position of being able to work very closely within the European Space Agency and there are some things that we do we could not do bilaterally. We would not be placing a rover built in Stevenage on the surface of Mars leaving our planet in 2028 if it was not through working with the European Space Agency and, I should say, with NASA, since we removed all Russian componentry from it after the Ukraine invasion.
Similarly, we can just exploit the fact that there is shared infrastructure through the European Space Agency, some of which is housed in the UK, particularly around communications and some of the commercial applications of space. As Lord Willetts says, that does not mean it is our only route. We work, taking science examples, directly with the US, with NASA, on HelioSwarm. We work directly with Japan on something called LiteBIRD, which is a dark matter search. We work directly with Australia on AquaWatch. We have been able to build up these relationships.
One thing has changed in the last three years. It used to be very bottom up where JPL in California might approach a scientist or group of scientists in the UK to be part of a mission, then there would be a bit of scrabbling around for money to find out how to fund them. Now we have the cover of these bilateral funding programmes and we can invite calls, and the best calls from the UK and our partner countries get funded.
Q20 Baroness Stowell of Beeston: This is quite a neat segue. I want to ask about the National Audit Office. I do not know what it says about me that I have been given this question.
I understand that the NAO was somewhat critical of ESA’s return to the UK on the money that we send or spend through or that flows through ESA. I want to concentrate specifically on the national programmes. As I am sure you will know, the NAO was critical—and I think you declared this anyway in your annual report—of the fact that only 23 of the 31 national milestones had been completed in the period 2022-23. This has seemingly had an impact on your budget planning, underspends and all of that sort of thing, which presumably may have a negative effect on the case that you make in the CSR. What is your response to the NAO’s criticisms of how you have not been able to deliver the national programmes that you set out to do?
Lord Willetts: Paul is itching to answer that question, and he has powerful evidence of what we are doing. It was a very trenchant report and made very fair points.
In fact, the Space Agency slightly waxes and wanes like some other cosmic phenomena. It was tasked with narrowing down on operational responsibilities and delivering space programmes. We were going through the process of that and I think we have now delivered it very successfully. Our performance, if you look at all the external metrics, has significantly improved. Paul, you can give the chapter and verse on that.
Dr Paul Bate: NAO looked carefully at the 2022-23 financial year, and it showed that we had hit the majority of our milestones, but not all of them. We had spent the majority of our money but definitely not all the money that taxpayers provided, so the response had to be, “Do the job better”, which meant that, when we published the most recent annual report and accounts, we were able to show that we had spent 99.5% of the money—well within the 1% tolerance that the Treasury gave us. We had hit a higher percentage of our milestones. Our staff worked really hard. We also look very carefully at the civil service staff survey.
The NAO had also reported something that we knew well, which was that the morale in the agency had not been where it needed to be. Bullying and harassment rates had been far too high. I am pleased to say that now the bullying and harassment rates, as reported by our staff, have fallen by over 50%. The engagement levels of our staff have gone up. All we can ask from the NAO is to be judged on our results.
Lord Willetts: The geo-return is massively better as well. We have focused on raising our geo-return.
Q21 Viscount Stansgate: What would be the implications, in your view, of budgetary cuts or stagnation for UKSA? If there were to be very difficult decisions that had to be made in the light of stagnation or cuts, what would be your absolute top priorities to retain and save what is being done? It is not a very cheerful question but, nevertheless, give us an idea.
Lord Willetts: Obviously, these are matters that Ministers are going to decide in the next few months. We will implement whatever the decision is as efficiently as we can.
Overall, space is at an inflexion point, as I was saying earlier. This is a moment when many countries are doubling down on space. Just look at the number of likely lunar missions: at least 10 different countries planning lunar missions are in the next 10 years. Britain has had basically no engagement in lunar activity for the last 50 years. Now, for the first time in partnership with the Italians, we are working to get a shared satellite in orbit around the moon to provide comms. If Britain were to opt out from all that kind of stuff, just when everyone else is piling in, I think it would be a great pity. We will try, whatever the budget settlement we secure, to work as efficiently as we can to make the most of those opportunities.
Q22 Lord Clement-Jones: That was very illuminating relative to the question I am just about to ask. One of the agency’s key purposes is to fund space science and exploration activities, which account for just over one-third of the organisation’s spending. How does the agency navigate decisions between supporting commercial space and funding science and exploration?
Lord Willetts: Let Paul answer that. We do a lot on fundamental science, and it is really important, and it often drives technological innovation as well.
Dr Paul Bate: The biggest block of that money, about one-third, pays the subscription fee to the European Space Agency, and that funds all of the space science programme. That was very deliberately set up, since the European Space Agency was set up 50 or so years ago, precisely to give continuity to that long-range space science. We then build some instruments on top of that, but the core space missions on the science side are paid for out of the subscription, not out of any optional programmes that we might choose to subscribe to or not.
However, to take another example, such as exploration, we often fund programmes that are for exploration but are commercial in nature. Last week, the Blue Ghost lander landed on the surface of the moon. It would not have got into its lunar orbit without the orbital engine provided by a company called Nammo UK. It is called the LEROS 4 engine; it was tested in the UK and developed there.
Lord Clement-Jones: We should make more of them.
Dr Paul Bate: Absolutely. Sometimes, it is the ones that fall on their sides that get a little more attention, but Blue Ghosts are a very successful starting point.
That is an example of a company that has, I believe, over, 100 engines flying in space. It does a lot of its work in the UK. So we can do things that are deeply commercial in nature but that are also good for space science or space exploration.
Lord Clement-Jones: It is quite nuanced. You do not have these rigid categories except for the subscription, effectively, to the European Space Agency. It could be quite pragmatic, in a sense; if others are out there, we do not want to miss out on particular functions.
Lord Willetts: If I may say so, the pragmatism gets right up to the strategic level. Several of the questions have been about maximising private impact and commercial activity. We completely understand that, and that is a priority for us. There is a separate agenda, which is security and national requirements, which we call strategic autonomy in a different context—things that people say we need to have as the UK as a sovereign country.
We are operating in an environment where Ministers can rebalance. If an American company has a smart technology that nobody has thought of, that we do not particularly have an immediate obvious requirement for, and they say, “If we give them a grant of £10 million, it will set up a £100 million factory in the UK”, do we just say, “Fantastic, go for it; that is 10 times return”? Or do we pause and say, “Is there a national requirement for this? We have a limited budget. Should we be investing only in areas where there is a national requirement? Is this a capability that we need or not? When we have assessed whether we need this capability, we will come back to you”. I have caricatured it a bit, but we are always making a balance between rather different perspectives of what space is for.
Lord Clement-Jones: Your strategy awaydays must be quite good.
Dr Paul Bate: If I might say, the space sector is very porous between the science, engineering and commercial. We often find that the instruments that are cutting edge looking out into the universe become the same instruments that are then used back on earth perhaps for more commercial use. The people who design the instrumentation and the science behind a mission going to Mercury, like BepiColombo, end up working in high-end digital payloads and, in at least one case I can think of, then come to the UK Space Agency.
It is a sort of Goldilocks sector: it is big enough and small enough, if you see what I mean, to make an impact, but also for us to be able to fund science knowing that it is good for our understanding of the universe, but will also support the commercial endeavours.
Q23 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: I must say that it has been a fascinating session. I am going to go in a slightly different direction. Lord Willetts, you said that this was an inflexion point. At the beginning, Dr Bate, you said that we all talk to each other, but the area where there is maybe not quite enough talking is engaging the public. It is one of the things that slightly surprised me, being on this committee because we all—I think most people on this committee anyway—love science fiction; we have an image of going into outer space.
Should you not be more responsible for making the case for space among the public? Should there not be more rather basic discourse with the public about what space means? At the moment, maybe the public just think it is about some rather unpleasant billionaires—if I am allowed to make a value judgment. Lord Willetts—who I know, of course—are we branding the opportunities in our education system enough, because there are a lot of really interesting careers out there? This is something that I asked Dr Brian Cox last week, and he said no and that there is a real skills problem. I had a couple of questions there; I thought I would roll them up, otherwise the Chair would stop me.
The Chair: I cannot stop you.
Lord Willetts: Space and dinosaurs are the two things that really get kids interested in science and they are a great start. I completely agree with what you say; we do have an active programme, but can always do more. Tim Peake’s mission has had a fantastic effect. There is a lot going on, but we could do more.
Dr Paul Bate: It is right about space and dinosaurs. Some people say that the dinosaurs died out because they did not have a space agency. I am not sure whether that is true or not.
The truth is that we spend four times as much as we did three years ago on education, outreach and future workforce because it is so important. Sometimes it will be around a seminal event, such as the six-month mission that Tim Peake flew in 2015 into 2016, but that was nearly a decade ago. We will very much look to use events like the future launches of rockets from the Shetland Islands—hopefully later this year—as a galvanising moment.
However, one thing we have learned, and we have a really expert team in the agency, is that while it is great to do one-offs—and it can also be very exciting to talk to people and to go into schools—what makes a difference is the professionally run programme. We often fund others who we know will do it well. We fund the 25 Association for Science and Discovery Centre science centres to do that work well. We work very closely with the European Space Agency on ESERO-UK. We have a Scout Association and Girlguiding tie-up and we work with the Jon Egging Trust.
We do it through these three programmes: Space to Inspire; Space to Learn, which is more fundamentally educational; and Skills for Space, which is building that future workforce, including space interns or SPINterns. I think there is even more that we could do but we think it is one of the things that we need to and are doing more on.
Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: Is the Space Skills Alliance funded by you?
Dr Paul Bate: Yes, that is funded by us as well and it does extraordinary work.
Lord Willetts: An incredibly high proportion of the space workforce are graduates. Centres for doctoral training can help to deliver these programmes. People think of an academic as someone writing papers; I have seen people literally at their benches supervising soldering as part of their doctoral programme, as they design a new piece of equipment for a satellite. This is a very highly educated workforce.
The Chair: Thank you both ever so much for your time. It has been a terrific session. Lord Willetts and Dr Bate, thank you very much for being with us.
