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This article looks ahead at 2020, the year by which we were promised so much. By the likes of me. So, what will 2020 actually bring for the space sector?

This article builds on my opening keynote at the 31st UKSEDS National Student Space Conference in Edinburgh in March 2019, giving a State of the Nation on the status of the Scottish sector & examining the challenge of achieving the Scottish government supported growth targets for the sector.

As engineers we often forget that the only purpose of our spacecraft is to give the payload the environment it needs. To keep it warm, to keep it cold, to protect it from the space environment. To point it in the correct direction, and hold it stable and safe. To tell it what to do and when. To make the data or service it provides work.

That other nations have chosen to not do this should not diminish China’s achievement. But equally, it shouldn’t diminish the achievements of other. Whilst China was landing on the moon, NASA was conducting humanity’s most distant ever exploration, with New Horizons at the snowman shaped Ultima Thule. At the same time NASA were...

When asked to describe myself, I tend to say I am a professional space technology engineer, working in academia. I’ve worked in the space industry my whole career...

On 12 April 1961 Major Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth. Since then a further 532 people have done so. This week, almost 55 years later the first British European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, Tim Peake, becomes the 533 person to do so.

Applications of space data and technology today spread far beyond traditional users and operators in sectors such as national security and telecommunications, with space having a transformational impact on sectors as diverse as forestry, agriculture and the financial markets. Indeed, the UK’s space sector has...

Space debris has made the headlines again recently with the crew of the International Space Station sheltering in the docked Soyuz vehicle as a fragment from a now-defunct Russian weather satellite (International Designator 1979–095AD) passed at around three kilometres distance on 16 July. This followed...

With the confirmed launch of over 100 new nano-spacecraft into orbit by a San Francisco start-up within the next twelve months, how have these craft evolved from the classroom, through academia and into the entrepreneurial mainstream?

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the first human to journey beyond our fragile atmosphere, we find that the UK space industry is more fashionable than ever.