During the Defence Space 2024 conference in London on 24 September, a panel convened to explore how to foster relations between government and industry in the UK space defence sector.
The panelists – largely made up of industrial suppliers – called for the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) to specify their capability requirements if they want to successfully leverage the growing space industrial base.
According to a UK Space Agency report published on 26 July 2024, the British industrial population – consisting of 1,765 organisations that are space-related – accrued revenue of up to £18.9bn ($25.3bn) in 2023. Some 20 organisations account for 75% of the space-related income, 142 for the next 15%, and more than 1,600 for the remaining 10%.
Nevertheless, Andrew Stanniland, CEO, Thales Alenia Space, suggested that the government should consider “spending a bit of time on what you want to do” before issuing “half-baked requirements.”
The panelists described how the government approaches industry for a multitude of space-based solutions, offering to release more funds down the line for various projects to which industry respond. “It’s exhausting,” Stanniland pointed out, “it’s like dangling a carrot you’re never going to get.”
What can industry do to facilitate decision-making?
There are things that industry can do to facilitate discussions with defence procurement. One solution posed by the chair of the panel, John Hanley, UK Space and senior vice president, CGI UK, is that “we need to put our technical [specialists] in those meetings… that’s on us to do.”
This would bridge the gap between government and industry by laying out the capabilities that are possible and would be useful to the aims and objectives that UK Defence face in the new domain.
More “unstructured time to figure out a problem” would also prove invaluable, according to Kata Escott, managing director and head of country, Airbus Defence and Space UK.
Government must protect space assets
Although the MoD has prized space defence in numerous security analyses over the last few years, there is still a lack of understanding as to what is needed in space.
The government tends to treat space as an enabler while neglecting the need to protect important space-based assets, such as Skynet military satellite communications.
It is this limited understanding of space, and the domain’s treatment as an after thought to tanks, ships and planes, that has led to government requirements being muddled when they reach out to industry. If the government does not fully understand the nature of space in defence today, then it cannot procure what is needed to succeed.
“I think quite often there’s this misconception that space is a sort of luxury add-on that we can afford once everything else is in order,” said Juliana Suess, Research Fellow in Space Security, Royal United Services Institute. “That’s not the case. Space is the baseline.
“Space provides the basis of technologies that we use every day: communications, intelligence, surveillance, navigation timing – all these are really crucial things that are quite often forgotten about because they’re currently working.”
