Three Years as Your Friendly, Neighbourhood, Space Applications Ambassador

Today is an important milestone for me, as I mark my three-year anniversary as the ESA Business Applications Ambassador for North West England and North Wales.

To have been selected as the first person to hold this position remains a genuine honour and I would like to thank those in ESA, in STFC, in the UK Space Agency, in the many regional business I’ve worked with, and in the UK Ambassador Network, especially Ian Downey and Victoria Christmas, whose consistent support and expertise has been invaluable these last 1095 days.

In Britain, and across the world, innovative tech businesses make hundreds of billions of dollars by using the petabytes of data from the thousands of sensors, beacons, and relays that orbit our planet, creating new services, breaking into new markets, and gaining unique insights for their customers. In fact, the application of data either derived or relayed by satellites for services in non-space sectors makes up ￡11.6bn of the UK’s ￡16.4bn space industry. That’s 71% of the nation’s entire space economy!

In the coming years, as sensors become more sophisticated and affordable, and as the price of launching them into space continues to plummet, the range and quality of data from satellites will become even more attractive to those creating unique digital services for their customers. In fact, projecting forwards a decade or two, these factors are predicted to accelerate the value of the international space sector to over a trillion dollars, and the UK is on track to eventually capture 10% of this global market.

The region I represent is home to some world-class tech assets; from the nation’s most powerful industrially available supercomputer at SciTech Daresbury, to the new R&D Spaceport being considered in Snowdonia. We develop, build, and maintain stealth fighters, nuclear submarines, and supercars. We created the railway, the modern computer, and Graphene. We are home to such organisations such as GCHQ, the European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre, and the Square Kilometre Array, a multi-billion dollar international treaty organisation that is building a radio telescope the size of the entire planet.

A report last year named Manchester as the top location for tech businesses in the UK, outranking even London, and looking at the wider region, there are formidable tech capabilities in the Liverpool City Region, across Cheshire and Warrington, throughout Lancashire and Cumbria, and the length and breadth of North Wales, including the Menai Science Park on Anglesey, and the Optic Centre at St Asaph.

Recently, I’ve worked with Aerospace Wales to help deliver the latest Welsh Space Strategy, which sets the goal of capturing 5% of the UK space turnover by 2030, and in North West England, I have co-led on the development of a soon-to-be-published document which lays the foundations of a formal ‘North West Space Cluster’; a collaborative constellation of capabilities, facilities, and programmes, stretching from Cheshire to Cumbria, from the peaks of the Pennines to the shores of the Irish Sea, that will turbo-charge the region’s digital, manufacturing, and research sectors to deliver high quality jobs and economic growth for generations to come.

Over the last three years, I have helped a range of businesses to understand and impliment space applications, crucially, facilitating over ￡3m worth of successful applications for funding and support for projects in sectors as varied as sports event photography, utilities, health services, and civil security.

From monitoring bridges and transport infrastructure, to connecting rural communities; from creating robust FinTech services, to improving spectator safety at major events, there is no sector that cannot benefit from ubiquitous, resilient communications, from accurately monitoring and modelling the positions and movements of assets and people, or from near-real time (and historical) insights of any location anywhere on Earth. To be blunt; if you are not using space applications, it is likely that your competitors already are.

And here’s the secret… you can too.

It’s not rocket science, all it requires is a knowledge of your customer’s needs, a little imagination, and maybe a helping hand from your friendly, neighbourhood space applications Ambassador.

Here’s a short intro to satellites and their commercial applications:

It’s Not Rocket Science @ Elevate Exchange - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjC1hrirS0k&t=399s

Get inspired! Browse previous funded projects from ESA Space Solutions (searchable by sector, and space technology used) - https://business.esa.int/projects

For more information, peruse our website - https://business.esa.int/