Oral evidence: Space resilience, HC 572
Oral evidence, 19 October 2026.
The Chair
Order, order. We return to our inquiry with our second panel today, as part of our session on space resilience. Can I ask the panellists to introduce themselves?
Elizabeth Seward
Good afternoon. I am Elizabeth Seward. I am the CEO of Supersharp. We are a spin-out company from the University of Cambridge. We are now 38 people and we build thermal infrared space telescopes. My background, though, is working for BAE Systems and Airbus Defence and Space.
Stephanie Ayres
I am Stephanie Ayres. I am the head of policy at the UKspace trade association.
Robert Atchison
I am Robert Atchison, managing director of ClearSpace and previously space instructor in UK Space Command.
The Chair
Terrific. Thank you for being patient. We are running slightly over, so if you can give us as distilled and concise answers as possible, that would be very helpful as always. I will kick off by looking at the threat, which we covered earlier. We talked about the UK Space Strategy, which was published on 8 September. How did you read it in terms of the ambition within it and what it is committed to? You heard some of the responses that we just heard; what are your observations? Perhaps, Elizabeth, you could start.
Elizabeth Seward
Thank you. It was very welcome. It was a very well-rounded piece of work. It included civil and defence together, not quite for the first time but certainly in the most coherent way that we have seen. From a personal perspective, it put earth observation back as a priority, after it had been dropped in the one before. That is something we have a significant reliance on, so that was very good to see. It is a strategy, and as such, it sets out what we want to do, but it does not have the implementation alongside it setting out how we get there and how we do it, so there is definitely more work to be done. I see it as a good grounding and a good step 1, but we have to keep going on how we now deliver that and in what timescales. It has budgets assigned—you heard from the previous panel the comparisons to Germany—which are not significantly more than we were already spending. A lot of that is going to Skynet and the upgrade of our military communication system. But still, it is very welcome that we are going in the right direction.
The Chair
By mentioning Germany, do you think that we are not very ambitious?
Elizabeth Seward
Nobody is matching Germany. Some €35 billion for its space programme is a significant investment. We have around £7 billion, so we are very far behind that.
The Chair
How does that compare to France?
Elizabeth Seward
That is a good question. I do not have that figure to hand. Steph might do, when we get to her. But I believe that France is still spending more than us. We are not spending much of that money until 2030 onwards. At the minute, we are still doing the small programmes and the step-by-step approach, when we just need to be going faster. We have a lot of capability in the country that we could be using and delivering on for the national good.
The Chair
Is that frustrating for you as a start-up?
Elizabeth Seward
Yes. As a start-up, we are still on the path to commercialisation. Our first two satellites launch next year. We have got there through excellent support from the UK Space Agency and the grant funding. We are hitting that commercialisation gap and are now looking to sell them and to target government contracts here and abroad. But the pots of money we are looking at will not emerge for another three or four years, whereas we will be ready in the next six months.
The Chair
We will come back to that. Stephanie?
Stephanie Ayres
We also welcome the strategy, because it is the first time that they have tried to cohere across government departments. They have recognised that it is not just a scientific endeavour but also a fundamental enabler of national security, economic growth and functioning in a modern society. The Government are right to seek a more strategically focused approach and recognise the importance of sovereign capabilities. However, the UK has many of the ingredients, but I am less confident about the delivery. There was not much in there about the detail of how it is going to be delivered. We need to remember that this was a strategy for spending £7.8 billion that had already been identified, allocated and secured; it was not a strategy going beyond 2030. A lot of the money was going to be spent between 2030 and 2035, but other nations are making their plans into 2040, and, actually, we are, but through the ESA lens, which is a different thing. The French have their own national space budget which is a little bit in excess of ours, but they spend the same again through ESA, whereas we do not; our £7.8 billion also covers our ESA contribution.
The Chair
So they spend double what we do?
Stephanie Ayres
Yes, we used to be fourth in ESA spending and now we are fifth, so we are going in the wrong direction with our ESA spending. But, as I said, this particular strategy looks at the money that has been allocated and for this spending review. Going forward, we would expect the MoD and the UK Space Agency to work together to look to secure more funding, along the lines of our peer nations, to deliver the strategy. I would also like to see more resilience planning in a future strategy. This one does not sufficiently cover that.
The Chair
Do you think their priorities are clear, from the strategy?
Stephanie Ayres
I think the priority for now is clear, which is to put us on a footing towards another place. As far as that goes, the strategy is successful. To Will’s point, which he made earlier, the clear and present dangers are now slightly different and will evolve. I would like to see the strategy evolve to meet that. I would also like to see other government departments brought into the strategy. Currently, Defra, DESNZ et cetera are not represented; it is merely a strategy for the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade and the MoD.
Robert Atchison
What I would say from my view, and I would echo everything that has already been said, is that I see the green shoots of grand strategy and the UK returning to that in its viewpoint going past 2035, as Stephanie said. We have clear KPIs to 2030. At ClearSpace UK, I have the privilege of holding the UK’s active debris removal contract and we are going to de-orbit two satellites, with the launch scheduled for 2029 from SaxaVord, which gives the UK, as one nation in the world, a full circle of capability: launch, operate, de-orbit and potentially refuel as well, noting that there is a dependency on wider architecture. The space strategy is welcome in that it brings the national, defence and severe space weather strategies together into one, which I know, from a coherence and command-and-control perspective, from my previous life in the military, is critical at the start of any operation. But linking to national resilience, and what that looks like, is so multifaceted, and I would just say, based on my previous life, that our potential adversary states, such as Russia, train their military to operate without space. They accept that from the word go. Having served in Afghanistan and places such as that, I know that we were heavily reliant on unencrypted GPS. There was encrypted GPS for other things, but when we come to these operations, we either have an assumption that we track—we assume—or we follow through and say that we are going to fight for space and whatever that means.
The Chair
That is very interesting, thank you. Baroness Tyler?
Baroness Tyler of Enfield
I would like to pursue the issue of government support and involvement. Can you say whether you feel that the investment—clearly, we have heard that it is not on the same scale as a number of other countries—and the reforms in the space industry, which are set out in the strategy, give you confidence that the UK will be able to build a sufficient space resilience and capability, both civilian and military? In answering, could you reflect briefly on the point that came across very strongly in the first panel about an overreliance on the US and whether you feel that we should be pivoting our investment more towards Europe and the UK industry.
Elizabeth Seward
Shall I kick off? I will pick up on a question asked of the previous panel, which was whether we could retrofit all our assets. The UK does not have very many sovereign satellites that it owns and controls. We have four military communication satellites in the Skynet system. We now have, I think, three earth observation satellites. Potentially there are one or two classified ones, although I am not sure that there are. We have a handful, or potentially two handfuls, of satellites. We really do not have very much infrastructure to secure or retrofit. That also means that we do not have very much to rely on if we lose access to everything else. Mr Marshall made a good point, that numbers count. That is very true, and we in the UK do not have them. But it is not just numbers, it is also mixing data sources, different actors and different types of data. Planet has optical systems, such as what you would take on your iPhone camera. There is radar available, which we can build in the UK and have done at the Airbus site in Portsmouth but do not today. My company is building thermal infrared. Those are the three layers that you need for earth observation. Then we have communications and GPS—the timing and navigation system. We have access to many of these things through our allies and we have the ability to buy them commercially, but the UK does not have a resilience plan and strategy for which ones we need to employ at which time and where we can get priority access to. Resilience is all about, as Rob said, what do we need to be able to rely on and who owns that. Who owns that capability and delivery? What level of service do we need, both operationally and if there is some sort of problem? What is the minimum at which we can operate successfully? Those are the questions that we have not yet asked ourselves as a nation and the ones that you will have the challenge of answering in your report. We are here to help you do that. Do I think we as a country can do it? Absolutely; we have some world-leading capability in this country. We have amazing large-scale satellite manufacturing at the Airbus plants. We have small companies that are growing, such as ClearSpace with its new contract and others around the country. We are really good at university spin-outs, building new technologies and doing R&D. We are not very good at getting those to commercialisation and supporting them through scale, and we do not have very many government contracts to actually use this amazing tech that we produce.
Stephanie Ayres
I would like to build on what Liz said. I am going to call for what we called for in our submission, along with an audit. We think that for the industry we need to have a national space resilience exercise: an industrial preparedness programme. It needs to be connected through the Cabinet Office, Defence and DBIST, along with trade bodies and other relevant associations. It should have four elements. First, there should be some national dependency mapping, such as Liz described. We need to identify our critical services and their dependencies on space. We have to remember that all of our critical national infrastructure, including the grid et cetera, absolutely relies on space-enabled services. They have to be mapped. Secondly, we need to map the vulnerabilities and alternative provisions, including second and third-order dependencies. We have all sorts of international allies and partners in that mix that we need to be aware of. They are probably good, but we need to establish that. We need to do scenario-based war-gaming where we look at the loss of PNT or SATCOM or earth observation or ground infrastructure or spectrum and the data integrity, but we need to look at them under different durations and different threat conditions, because something that goes out for a couple of hours is very different to something that goes out for weeks and might need to have a spacecraft put up to replace it. The third thing we need is industrial mobilisation planning. We need to establish what industry can deliver in 72 hours, in 30 days, in six months, and beyond, including supply chains, personnel, launch capacity and manufacturing. Commercial operators need pre-agreed arrangements covering prioritisation, compensation, liability et cetera. The first time we use these integrated things should not be during a crisis. Fourthly, we need the investment feedback. Where do we have gaps? What do we need to invest in? To your point about the US versus the EU, where do we go to get the help? We do not want to replicate what the United States and Europe are doing. That would be unaffordable and unnecessary. Instead, we should be identifying where the UK needs genuine autonomy and where it can develop distinctive capabilities that make us indispensable to those allies. That is a very strategic thing for us. We do not want to be replicating capabilities that lie elsewhere. On the numbers, in the things that we are looking at here, NSpOC, our National Space Operations Centre, tracks around 811 UK assets in space all the time. Of those, 640-something are OneWeb satellites, of which we own only 16%. Eutelsat and the French own the rest. The challenge of us auditing what we have in space and working out what to do with it is not as big as it may sound. The challenge is going to come when we try to work out what to do about that. That is Rob’s job: to repair, replenish and remove.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield
I know that time is pressing now but would you like to add anything?
Robert Atchison
No.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield
Are you sure?
Robert Atchison
Yes, I will wrap it into another answer.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield
Okay. In a word, or a sentence, can any of you say whether it would be helpful for the Government to be more interventionist in this area?
Robert Atchison
Yes.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield
That is three yeses. Thank you very much.
Lord Jack of Courance
I fear there might be some overlap but I want to carry on with this theme of developing resilient capabilities. How can the Government ensure that UK-based companies are best able to contribute to developing UK sovereign capability in space? That is open to all three of you to answer. We know that the Government need to help, but what is the best way that they can help?
Robert Atchison
One really positive thing is the Technology and Growth Alliance that has just been stood up, which seeks to take IP that has, in essence, been put on the shelf by the Ministry of Defence. This is where previous pounds have been spent and the IP has got to a technology-readiness level and we are now seeking to commercialise it. Those pathways and that help are really important, particularly for the SMEs that spin out of it. I am very privileged to be able to say that I have an anchor contract from the UK Space Agency to go and do active debris removal, but we are keenly aware that that is more than a contract; it is about establishing an industrial base from which we can grow and then work with, for example, Elizabeth and others to put those sensors on there. To answer a previous question, the one thing that I would add about how we do this, is that we as the United Kingdom should be quite selective in what we say our strengths and weaknesses are. With my military hat on, there is always space for deception. We as a nation, as Elizabeth said, will never, nor should we, be replicating, but we can divert other people’s attention to areas that we want them to look at, which gives us freedom. That could be the industrial base, but it could also be from a strategic perspective. The UK’s overseas territories are a great asset that we do not make full use of.
Lord Jack of Courance
Do you want to add anything, Stephanie?
Stephanie Ayres
I would just say that the UK Space Agency has a very good Unlocking Space programme through which it intervenes and helps other government departments, for example, recognise and use space. But there are a number of things that we, as the industry, ask the Government for, such as predictable pipelines, access to defence procurement, which is very problematic for small space companies, more targeted scale-up finance and the protection of international market access. The EU Space Act and the Made in Europe efforts are really damaging us and we need the Government to lean into that. We also need some strategic supplier assessment. There are some companies that the Government have put in the strategy as being worth around £10 million or able to make £10 million. That might be a bit of a blunt instrument. There may be companies that need to be helped because of their strategic capabilities rather than their ability to get to £10 million necessarily. Those are the sorts of interventions that the industry would like to see.
Elizabeth Seward
I would say procurement and purchasing services, hardware or technologies. We do relatively well on grant funding, although I will note that the UK Space Agency grant funding programmes are always hugely oversubscribed, which is often presented as, “Isn’t this fantastic?” but actually it means that there are far more companies that could be doing great things if we had more funding to do so. One of the consequences of that is that the matched-funding contributions keep going up, so as a small company you get only 60% to 80% of the grant. Everything has now dropped to about 70%, so you have to find that extra 30%, which means you have to find investors and many of those investors are not British. So we lose control of the companies at much earlier stages. Then, when you get to a certain level and are ready for commercialisation, those procurement contracts either do not materialise or take a very long time, and as a small company with salaries to pay and a runway that you can see the end of, it is a very different situation than if you are a large systems integrator and it is just another project that gets delayed by a year. This slowdown of defence spending, with all the reviews we have been doing, has had a huge impact on many of the space companies.
Lord Jack of Courance
We know that the Government are looking to develop partnerships to ensure that they have reliable access to critical space-based services in the event of a crisis. Where should they be looking for these partnerships and how should they be looking for them?
Elizabeth Seward
Again, when it comes to resilience, having that proliferated set of partnerships is also useful. From my side in earth observation, we are seeing a very strong push towards the High North and the Canada-Norway-UK alliance. Certainly, as a company we have been having conversations with other companies that link into the government strategy. There is also Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the other Five Eyes nations. The US is still a strong partner because it has such a wealth of knowledge and capability that we should not discount it at this stage. But it should not be the only one. It is about spreading who we are working with and how. I just want to add one thing on cyber in case we do not come back to it. I know that we talked a lot about cyber attacks in space, with satellites and on ground infrastructure, but there are also cyber attacks on companies. I have talked to colleagues running small companies and we have had a significant number of cyber attacks on my company and also on others, because space is seen as so critical. This is something we work with Cyber Essentials Plus on, and there is some government support, but that would also be a useful area for greater support for critical industries. Because of the way in which the attacks are happening and becoming so sophisticated, we have to have a constant monitoring of who we are talking to and what we are talking about. It is quite draining and takes a lot of effort away from what we should really be doing.
The Chair
I am afraid we are nearing time and are going to cease to be quorate. In the final minute, with apologies to colleagues who will not be able to come in, can I ask you, when it comes to SMEs—given that your business background is that you started as a start-up or spin-out from a university or research programme—just in two points, what could the Government be doing and what can we encourage them to do to ensure that this great innovation culture that we have actually becomes commercialised in the UK?
Elizabeth Seward
More, smaller and faster contracts for small companies with a higher-risk appetite, and a lower barrier to entry; and more support, which is increasingly massively but needs to be faster, for defence and how small companies can access defence contracts.
Stephanie Ayres
I would echo that, but I would also say the continuity of those grants and that funding—no stopping and starting for reviews et cetera.
Robert Atchison
Using the Government to champion us overseas, through the DBIST and giving us the exploitation route out of the United Kingdom and championing what is best. Finally, the overheads are often what kills SMEs, and security is a big part of that, so having an infrastructure area where the likes of us can go and work from and, in essence, pay for access, where clearances are sponsored, and it is in a useful location not—
The Chair
So a cyber secure and physically secure space?
Robert Atchison
Exactly that.
The Chair
There were other points that we wanted to raise with you. Perhaps we can put them in writing and you can respond. Sorry that we have had to cut the time. We were planning to finish at 6 pm, but we are unable to run over because we are going to cease to be quorate and the committee has to be quorate. Thank you for your time and for the information you shared with us. That concludes our second panel and today’s session. Order, order.