National space agency for Blighty, says Drayson
Skylon spaceplane fleet to follow? Hmm...
Biznovation minister Lord Drayson has announced that the UK is to get a proper space agency along the same lines as the USA's NASA, French CNES and German DLR.
Until now, British government space business has been handled by a loose alliance of departments and research councils - though the UK commercial space sector has become a major world player, approaching the turnover of Blighty's car industry.
"Our space sector hasn't missed a beat during this recession," said Drayson, addressing the Rutherford Appleton Space Conference in Didcot, Oxfordshire yesterday.
"This is the classic story of outstanding UK science and entrepreneurship continuing to create jobs and achieve exceptional growth."
The nearest thing the UK has had to a space agency thus far is the British National Space Centre, a liaison group between the various government bodies concerned with space - six Whitehall departments, two research councils, the Technology Strategy Board and the Met Office.
Meanwhile, without making a lot of ink (except occasionally from us here at the Reg), the UK space biz has become a major industrial player. The sector is now judged to have a turnover of between £6.5bn and £7bn, achieved on the back of meagre government spending of just £270m (mostly in the form of contributions to unmanned European Space Agency projects). Some 68,000 workers are employed in Blighty's various space enterprises.
By way of comparison, the perpetually ailing mainstream British automotive sector* has turnover of £9.8bn - only a bit more than space - but gets enormously more in the way of government support.
A central space agency would seem a long overdue step for a fairly major space nation. But the plans aren't detailed - Drayson didn't specify a timetable, much less a budget.
Then there's the matter of manned spaceflight. Blighty has long had a firm policy against paying for manned space missions, even as part of the ESA coalition. (Despite this, the ESA has lately selected British Army test pilot Tim Peake as an astronaut - fairly openly hinting as it did so that the UK might care to rethink its manned-missions policy.) Can a proper space agency really continue with this stance?
All these matters need to be settled before plans can become firm, and it seems fairly likely that Drayson's remaining tenure as a minister is now to be measured in months. He may not get the chance to turn words into deeds.
However it appears that the agency, at least in the form of a bureaucracy of some sort if not a serious national space programme, will become a reality anyway. We contacted the Tories for comment, and got a response from shadow Science minister Adam Afriyie:
We welcome the creation of a British Space Agency but this announcement smacks of pre-election spin. Clearly the devil will be in the detail and we’ll be examining the proposals very closely...There is a clear case for improving space policy coordination and I hope a new agency and a new government can take the industry forward.
Meanwhile, there is of course the knotty question of what the proposed body should be called. The Tories' "British Space Agency" tag has the merit of being simple, but rather humdrum. Just to get the ball rolling, we would offer the "Department/Directorate of Astronautical Research and Exploration": DARE, in honour of Blighty's best-known fictional space ace.
Let's hope that this bold new initiative will see British astronauts of the future hurtling into orbit aboard brilliant Blighty-designed Skylon spaceplanes, before assembling the payloads into part-British deepspace plasma drive void cruisers and heading out to the planets.
Even if it does seem likelier that in fact nothing much will change. ®
* As opposed to motorsport, which is another huge UK industry success story.
COMMENTS
@ Chris Thomas Alpha
"because ultimately, it has very little value, there is nothing up there, just empty space, what's the point of investing money into it?"
Tell that to SSTL and EADS. They have made successful businesses supply stuff to do work in this nothingness. Further ahead satellite solar power could run a lot of the world until the sun goes out.
"the problem is that space is very hard to access, "
With expendable rockets yes. It has been known since the 1960s that the energy to get to orbit is about the same as the round trip (both ways) fuel consumption for uk-Australia (worked out by Douglas aircraft. The people who built the DC3).
"right now, we barely do anything interesting, because most of the technology we need to live "comfortably" up there, doesn't exist yet."
And if I'm understanding you correctly never would. Nothing to see, nothing to do, no reason to go -> no reason to develop long term life support.
<viking analogy skipped>
Not equivalent. Lots of peoples developed ships. Quite a lot developed ocean going ships. More to the point was there were *incentives* to do so. In the US those incentives are driving the COTS programme to fund 2 developers to supply the ISS at rather less than a Shuttle flight. They don't get paid if they don't deliver anything. So far it's working well. There are also disincentives. For example the responsibility for cleaning up a failed launcher (or out of control satellite) is not on the supplier, but on their national government because the relevant treaty *never* considered that orbital launch could be carried out by a private company.
It's like stealth aircraft, the Americans paid how many billions to figure out how to build it?
Actually they paid to make aircraft the shape that their software said they needed to be in the materials they needed to be made in. The original research was Russian.
It's expensive to be the trailblazer and cheap to be the runner up, but at the end, we are all at the end of the racetrack
People have played follow-the-leader with the US for decades, not just in the technology but in the development process.
Guess what. If you copy a very expensive vehicle (built by a very expensive development process) using the *same* process you *get* a very expensive vehicle with the same very high launch costs giving a very high cost per Kg to orbit.
Note the common denominators here. Limited independent thought and a belief in a highly bureaucratic process.
The last generation of US government sponsored expendables cost in the $1-1.5Bn to develop (without any launches). The Space Exploration (compatible with he low-mid range of these) has cost $200-250m, including 4 launches so far. Does that suggest that how you develop is as important as what you develop?
What could it be if a more creative approach was tried?
You should be careful when reasoning by analogy. They can be very misleading.
Hands Off
It would appear that the private sector has done remarkably well on it's own, I suggest that the government and it's business crippling bureaucracy keeps it's hands well off this British success story.
I wonder what the chances...
of it being called the British Experimental Rocket Group...?
Bernard would finally be proud...
MW
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