Scotland's space race needs to move beyond launch
Competition is intensifying as the global space race heats up
In a warehouse at Glasgow’s Hillington Park industrial estate, Scottish space entrepreneur Tom Walkinshaw and his team have spent this week making final preparations for launch on Elon Musk’s Space X.
Alba Orbital, a company Walkinshaw founded in his bedroom in 2012, is hoping that today’s the day one of the tech billionaire’s rockets sends into orbit a payload of miniature satellites called PocketQubes, with the Glasgow company acting as “launch broker” for customers in Hungary, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan.
It will be the eighth time Alba Orbital has used Space X to propel these Rubik’s cube-sized satellites into orbit since Walkinshaw started doing this six years ago. The launch will bring the total number of PocketQubes handled by Alba Orbital to 57, meaning the Scottish company will account for over half of these “nanosatellites” sent into space so far by anyone in the world.
Walkinshaw’s company, which started out making nanosatellites, is emblematic of Glasgow’s emergence as the largest manufacturing cluster by volume in Europe for such satellites, as well as larger versions known as CubeSats. Both are used for applications like Earth observation, telecommunications, and deforestation monitoring.
Nanosatellites are cheap to produce as well as to launch, which costs as little as €25,000 at Alba Orbital. This is helping what Walkinshaw says is a mission to “democratise” space. “Our goal is to get more people flying more stuff into orbit and enabling more users of space,” he tells me.
Alba Orbital is part of a constellation of businesses that makes up Scotland’s surprisingly diverse space industry. There’s Thistle Rocketry, which develops in-space propulsion systems, and Earth Blox, a data and cloud startup founded in 2019 at Edinburgh University for tracking deforestation and post-disaster recovery management. The Scottish government says the sector employs over 7,000 people at almost 250 organisations.
It’s an ecosystem that gives Scotland an edge, says Natasha Nicholson, chief executive of industry association Space Scotland. “Lots of countries are very good with the data. Some are very good with the manufacturing. Some do a bit of both. But because we have the ability to design, manufacture, integrate, test, track and use the data, all within the borders of this country, and very soon being able to launch as well, makes us pretty unique,” she explains.
When it comes to launch, Scotland is home to five of the seven spaceports under development in the UK, led by SaxaVord in Shetland, the UK’s first fully licensed vertical launch spaceport. Forres-based orbital launch company Orbex, in which Scottish National Investment Bank is an investor, has received UK government funding for its first launch from SaxaVord next year.
Yet the ecosystem’s future success is not assured, as delegates meeting at next week’s Space-Comm conference in Glasgow are likely to discuss.
That’s because competition is intensifying as the global space race heats up. A report just published by the House of Lords entitled “The Space Economy: Act Now or Lose Out” cites evidence from the UK Space Agency warning of an increasingly “contested, congested and competitive” environment.
This is most obvious in launches, where government support is propelling capabilities rapidly in Norway, France and Italy, which invests three times more that the UK in civil space projects. Last month, MPs on the Scottish Affairs Committee warned that Scotland “risks missing a generational opportunity to lead in space launch” as the UK was “falling behind its European counterparts in terms of public investment”.
As important as launch is, including as part of national defence capability, Scotland now needs to ramp up efforts in areas that offer a competitive advantage to a global marketplace - and to investors - such as services in data and in-space manufacturing. “In order to be able to compete on the global stage, we need to look beyond launch and consider the entire value stream,” says Naomi Pryde, Edinburgh-based global co-chair of the space practice at law firm DLA Piper.
She says areas to exploit include operating and managing space assets through things like in-orbit satellite control and ground station operation, as well as services such as satellite communications, Earth observation data and analytics, and navigation and positioning services.
Shifting focus in this way matters because increasing competition threatens to turn nanosatellite manufacture into a commoditised business. It may be no coincidence that over 80 per cent of revenues at Alba Orbital, which started out making nanosatellites, now comes from broking “ride sharing” on launches.
Moreover, opportunities are likely to grow from areas such as space’s microgravity vacuum environment. This offers potential to grow human tissue and produce purer crystals, leading to higher-quality semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. All of this presents opportunities for terrestrial businesses, too.
Fortunately, there seems to be no shortage of startups and university expertise in Scotland. Ten space startups, including Thistle Rocketry, are being hosted at the Higgs Centre for Innovation at Edinburgh’s Royal Observatory, where Space Scotland is based. Strathclyde University is running a space systems research programme called PRISM that was recently shortlisted for UK government funding.
Yet it is funding on a more strategic scale that may be the biggest challenge. As the House of Lords report argued, the UK’s funding model for space requires shifting from the current grant-based approach designed to propel research and development “to one in which government procurement is used to crowd in private investment and strengthen national capabilities”.
Craig Clark, co-founder of Clyde Space, the first space company in Glasgow and sector pioneer, says: “You need to constantly evolve and be prepared to do things differently. But there is a chance of losing our competitive edge.”
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.