Space - "The new frontier ..."​

Space is the new frontier offering multitudes of opportunities for enterprising scientists, engineers, explorers and entrepreneurs alike. In 2018, services derived from satellites in space contributed a massive 10% of economic activity to UK GDP. Furthermore, the UK Government and the space industry have ambitions to capture 10% of the global space market by 2030. Space is a priority sector for the UK with the UK Space Agency, UKSPACE, ESA and others providing many programmes of support to help the industry flourish.

Opportunities in space are often nowadays characterised by headline stealing up-stream developments, such as reusable spacecraft, low-cost launch capability and the design, manufacture and operations of low-cost small satellites including cube-sats. The up-stream generally encompasses space componentry, systems and infrastructure.  Cube-sat missions, as an illustration, provide low-cost access to space and generally cost 1/50th of major satellite missions. However, it is the down-stream applications of space-technology that utilise and exploit space-bourne infrastructure that provide the greater economic impacts.

 Some examples of how satellites continue to change our lives include:

• Allowing large areas of the Earth to be viewed at once and to zoom in on areas of interest;

• Enabling the collection of more data, more quickly than ground-based instruments;

• Providing access to data and communication links for places that are hard to reach;

• Enabling us to see into space better than telescopes on the surface of the Earth; due to the absence of atmospheric obscuration;

• Allowing us to position ourselves and navigate anywhere on Earth.    

  
  

In July 1960, during his speech for acceptance of democratic nomination for president, John F Kennedy asked the American public to be pioneers towards a new frontier of the 1960s which, amongst many things, included mastery of the far side of space. By the end of the decade on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first man to step on the moon with “…one giant leap for mankind”.

It’s been over 45 years since the final moon landing of the Apollo missions in December 1972; and in the last few decades mankind has made leaps and bounds into space including:

• The ongoing multi-national collaborative operations of the International Space Station (ISS) since November 1998;

• The landmark event of December 21, 2015 that saw the historic vertical landing of a re-usable Space-X Falcon 9 rocket;

• The history making commercial delivery of Astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the ISS by the Crew Dragon spacecraft launched from Kennedy Space Centre on May 30, 2020;

• Launches and initial operations of mega-constellations of Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellites offering commercial services; such as Starlink and OneWeb;

• Our very own domestic spaceflight programme, LaunchUK, establishing horizontal and vertical spaceports in Scotland and Cornwall.

  
  

We’ve moved on so-much since those first steps in the 1960s and in some-ways gone full-circle too with ambitions to return to the moon, albeit as a staging-post for humans reaching Mars and beyond. It was also in the 1960s that Star Trek boldly arrived on American TV with Captain James T Kirk proclaiming the immortal words – “Space the final frontier”. Space is definitely the new frontier; and should continue to be characterised by enterprise, inclusivity and innovation.