It’s space, but not as we know it: the UK’s International Space Innovation Centre is the central core of a billion-pound growth industry. Lucy Barnard reports
Deep in rural Oxfordshire, just a stone’s throw from the sleepy village of Harwell, stands the International Space Innovation Centre – the UK’s first dedicated facility of its kind.
The 35,000 sq ft office and research block is not much to look at: it is a square, nondescript facility off a busy road on the edge of a science park – but to Sean Stewart, head of laboratory operations at the Science & Technology Facilities council, this is the UK’s equivalent to Cape Canaveral.
“Here will be the visualisation suite,” says Stewart, pointing to a blank, white wall. “Here, satellites will beam pictures of the Earth onto a giant television screen. This will enable people to plot glacier movements, weather patterns, crop failures, animal migrations and so on.
“At the moment, GCHQ and Whitehall are the only places in the country where you can view this sort of thing.”
These are just some of the mind-boggling activities planned for the £40m space centre, one of the buildings on Harwell Oxford, a 742-acre science campus owned jointly by property group Goodman and the UK government.
Last summer, technology company Magellium opened a subsidiary on the site and, a few doors along, the European Space Agency has established its first UK office. Just across the road stands the futuristic, flying-saucer-shaped Diamond Light Source – the UK’s national synchrotron facility, with a particle accelerator used in academic and industry research. Close by stands the government’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
“We are already filling up fast,” says Stewart, pointing to rows of closed doors along a corridor. “We have only about 1,000 sq ft left unlet in the building now. It’s proving very popular. We are achieving rents of £350 per m2, all in.”
The space centre, which is to open officially in April, is the first major new project for the UK’s first national space agency, launched in March last year by then-business secretary Lord Mandelson and then-science minister Lord Drayson.
Until last year and unlike most other countries, UK space policy had been split between government departments.
One of UK Space Agency’s objectives is to increase the size of the UK space market from around £7bn pa to around £40bn by 2020. One of the ways it hopes to achieve this is by using shared facilities such as the International Space Innovation Centre to spark greater interaction between the public and private sectors.
The coalition government is pursuing this goal, too. “It makes sense for government to back shared facilities – research platforms if you like – which private companies could not develop on their own,” said science minister David Willetts in a recent science policy speech.
Certainly, demand in the space sector is set to rocket, fuelled by demand for satellite technology. According to UKSA, the world’s space industry is likely to grow from £160bn in 2008 to at least £400bn by 2030, with an annual growth rate of 5%. The UK expects to harness around 10% of that market.
Sally Ann Forsyth, director of Goodman Science Parks, which is joint-venture owner of the Harwell Oxford campus, says that demand from UK space industries over the next few years could be out of this world.
“Although there are very few places in the world where you can actually launch rockets – and they tend to be in very remote places such as deserts – the UK, and Harwell Oxford especially, is fast growing as a centre for companies specialising in all the other parts of space technology,” she says.
“We already have a lot of the key players in or around the park and, because of the cross-fertilisation of ideas between scientists and industry, we are attracting even more.”
The International Space Innovation Centre is just part of Goodman’s plans to bring space technology to the long-established Harwell Oxford science campus in an attempt to both boost hi-tech industries and capitalise on their increased demand for space.
As one of the country’s two national science and innovation campuses – the other is in Daresbury in Cheshire – the park is home to around 150 organisations, including clusters of businesses specialising in healthcare, green energy and computing, as well as a large contingency of public sector scientists and engineers.
Goodman hopes that as these businesses expand, the science park can continue to provide new office and laboratory space for them.
“Business people see an advantage in being close to scientists,” says Forsyth. “They can bring ideas out of labs and into the market. It’s the commercial application of science. A few scientists set up a business, and then it grows. The idea is that there’s a lot of repeat business.”
Forsyth has responsibility for both of Goodman’s UK science parks: Harwell and Colworth science park in Bedfordshire. And, she says, the company is keen to expand both. “We are in the vanguard of UK science park expansion,” she says. “Science parks are historically a UK phenomenon and Harwell Oxford is one of the most well-known of them.”
The global space sector: to infinity and beyond
According to the UK Civil Space Strategy that was published last year, the global space sector grew at a rate of 7% to 8% pa in real terms between 2000 and 2008, with growth accelerating in the past three years in spite of the global economic downturn.
The UK’s share of the world space market in 2007 was around 6%, but the government’s specified goal is to expand the UK’s share of the global market to 10% over the next 20 years.
The strategy calls for research and development spending in the industry to rise by £5bn, and the international space centre (below) hopes to benefit from some of this increased spending.
