The Swindon-based UK Space Agency is to help foster new innovations in space-related technology by funding a programme to encourage more businesses into the sector.
The agency, based at North Star, has joined forces with SETsquared – Europe’s top university business incubator programme – to back 40 businesses through its acclaimed entrepreneurship programme. 
This will help them hone their business plans, tighten their propositions and gain access to investors – strengthening the UK’s role as a global player in the space sector.
The UK Space Agency was set up in Swindon five years to boost the UK space industry. Swindon was chosen as the agency’s hub because it already boasted a cluster of high-value funding organisations for industry and academia such as the Government research councils and the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK).
Its arrival underpinned Swindon’s ambition to be regarded as a centre for innovation, technology and advanced engineering.
While the UK has played a key role in the sector over recent decades, it faced falling behind other nations – particularly fast-growth economies such as China and India – in the space race.
Technologies developed for space exploration or for satellites often have commercial applications
Before the agency’s launch, the space and satellite industry in the UK was valued at £6bn and supported 68,000 jobs. The agency has a 20-year aim to create an industry worth £40bn with 100,000 highly-skilled jobs.
That would give the UK around 10% of worldwide space products and services market – up from its current 6%.
SETsquared – a partnership of the universities of Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey – helps entrepreneurs, researchers and SMEs working with space technology commercialise their products and services.
The businesses taking part in the scheme could be harnessing space technology for a range of applications – particularly using data available from satellites to novel businesses that utilise near global communications, global position, navigation and timing services or the myriad of observations about our planet that satellites can provide.
UK space gateway programme manager at the UK Space Agency, Colin Baldwin, said: “The space sector is a UK success story with aspirations to grow to a £40bn turnover by 2030. To achieve this, we anticipate hundreds of new companies will start providing new products and services that rely upon satellites. We are delighted that SETsquared, with its proven track record, will be on-hand to help these companies grow and flourish.”
SETsquared innovation director Simon Bond added: “We are seeing huge potential in some of the space-related research across the five universities. There are some ground-breaking technologies being developed that could become multi-million pound businesses. This partnership will effectively allow us to connect those ‘gems’ with the space sector and work together to nurture them.”
SETsquared’s incubation programme, ranked best in Europe and second best globally, has already fostered a number of successful start-ups working in the space technology arena. Among them is iGeolise, which relies on satellite data to power its Travel Time Platform.
The London-based company was formed in 2009 when its founder had the idea that it was more useful to find content on the web by the time it takes to travel there, rather than by distance. Since then, its team has built the Travel Time Platform that ‘turns distance into time’.
The platform locates, ranks and sorts content by travel time, not distance. The company’s API can be used by consumer facing websites or apps to help users do everything from search for the nearest pub by journey time to finding a house within a 30-minute commute to work.
As well as its Swindon base, the UK Space Agency operates a £40m International Space Innovation Centre at Harwell, Oxfordshire.
