The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Structural Reform Plan published in July 2010 commits BIS to establish the UK Space Agency as a full executive agency of BIS from 1 April 2011. This follows the UK Space Agency launch on 1 April 2010, which itself resulted from a decision by the previous Government following both a public consultation and a space innovation growth team report in 2009/10.
The UK Space Agency replaced the British National Space Centre (BNSC) which was an umbrella organisation of 10 Government departments, research councils and non-departmental public bodies.
The agency is operating in shadow form, whilst the detailed legal, administrative and financial commitments are agreed and completed before the agency begins operating as a full executive agency from April 2011.
The agency will work to ensure the UK has a competence in space technology.
This improves upon the previous structure whereby the British National Space Centre (BNSC) worked within a structure which was based on a partnership across government. In establishing the agency, consideration was paid to the sort of structure which would ensure and encourage continued growth, and equally importantly ensure that the UK retains a core competence on space applications, technologies and systems in both industry and academia.
The previous multi-partner approach meant that BNSC could not take active responsibility for the overall delivery of the government’s civil space strategy, and the ‘bottom up’ approach could have resulted in the UK losing its "critical mass" competence in space. Also, the structure had each partner programme budget operating on different timescales militating against having a unified long term programmatic and financial outlook.
The agency will also work to maximise UK benefits from space activities and to ensure that the UK remains at the forefront of global scientific excellence as well as in the exploitation of space infrastructure, products and services. The agency encourages interaction between industry and academia.
For more than a decade the UK space industry has shown consistently high growth levels, and this has been maintained even during the recession. Preliminary results from the ongoing biennial Study of the UK Space Industry indicate that growth over the last three years averaged about 11%.
The contribution of the UK space industry to the economy was highlighted in a 2009 report from Oxford Economics, sponsored by the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA), which showed that the UK space industry had a turnover of £5.9 billion and directly contributed around £2.8 billion to UK GDP in 2006/07. If the spill over effects from space investment in research and development are also included then the GDP contribution increases further to over £6.5bn a year.
Updates
|Space Science and Exploration Programme (Sept 2010) (PDF - 56Kb - opens in a new window)
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