The space industry has landed in Scotland and the nation looks set to be at the forefront of an expanding new sector
Space isn’t so much an industry, but an element that could underpin just about every other industrial sector that already exists on Earth. The economic potential is already huge and is expected to grow exponentially as the data gathered from orbit finds its way into the validation of ideas, accelerating communications, and measuring the impact of actions on this planet.
Scotland has discreetly built up a foothold in the orbital economy which the US-based Space Foundation estimates is already worth $546 billion (£432.2bn) globally. This is being driven by the commercial sector, with consultancy group McKinsey predicting that figure could reach $1 trillion by 2030.
Anyone who has checked the weather forecast, logged into SatNav, or used GPS devices on the golf course has already benefitted from the data gathered by satellites. What’s yet to come is potentially even more lucrative.
“It’s huge,” says Theresa Condor, co-founder of Spire Global which makes satellites in Glasgow. “The way we think about the space sector and the trajectory it is on right now is that it is analogous to how you think about the very early days of the computer and the internet.”
One futuristic element is space mining, which first came to the fore in 2017 when a number of companies thought they were getting close to extracting rare and valuable minerals from asteroids. That wasn’t the case and many start-ups in this field went bankrupt, but the potential remains.
Creating new drugs and medical treatments in space sounds futuristic, but this is much closer to reality than asteroid mining.
“What a lot of people don’t know is that 3,000 experiments have been done on the International Space Station and 2,000 of those were life sciences experiments including things like drug reformulation and growing tissues in space,” says Maureen Haverty of venture capital group Seraphim Space. “The tissues can be so much more perfect, so we are on route to being able to grow organs in space.
“This sounds like total science fiction but it is being done right now. It has just not been commercialised yet but we are starting to see a lot of developments where this could be commercialised within the next five to seven years.”
Yvette Hopkins, a former executive at the SaxaVord Spaceport in Shetland, said medical developments are for her one of the most exciting aspects of space. Having end-to-end space capability in Scotland opens up massive opportunities for economic and academic advancement in this country.
“I was talking to a university professor who does a lot of bacteria experimentations in space,” she said. “The ability for him to take his payload and put it in a satellite in Glasgow and physically drive it to Shetland and integrate it in the full system – that is huge.
“Right now he has got to go find where in the world he can get his experiment [loaded for launch]. Usually it’s Cape Canaveral. Can you imagine what this is going to do for this professor in Scotland?”
Read in full:
Scotland's space industry prepares to go into orbit
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