Opinion
Brilliant British space engineers don’t need Whitehall’s quangosAndrew Orlowski
The TelegraphMon, August 25, 2025 at 6:00 AM EDT
5 min read
Working on the Mars Rover was among the national space agency’s handful of success stories - Joe Giddens/PAFew tears were shed last week when the Government folded its space quango – the UK Space Agency (UKSA) – back into the Whitehall mothership.
A full year had elapsed since a scathing National Audit Office (NAO) report revealed a startling level of dysfunction. Space engineers and entrepreneurs I spoke to even reckon the agency may have been the worst of all New Labour’s creations.
So how did we get here?
The story of the UK in space is one of brilliant entrepreneurial talent of British boffins and Whitehall indifference, set against the backdrop of long-term industrial decline.
Today, Italy and France, who have retained more of their advanced engineering base, are now miles ahead.
As I have written in this column, we have a creative and dynamic engineering sector focused on the new opportunities created by lower launch costs.
For example, SpaceForge manufactures materials in space in tiny ovens – creating the “saffron of the semiconductor world”. Another start-up plucks space debris from the heavens with a mechanical arm.
But there isn’t much in the middle, between these tiny companies and Airbus, which played a key role in creating the Mars Rover.
“We’ve lost space. Even Russia is out of it, it’s a fading space power and it was the first,” says David Whitehouse, an award-winning author of books about the cosmos and a former BBC science correspondent. “Getting back in there takes decades.”
Forty years ago, enthusiasts like Whitehouse pushed for the creation of a British Nasa-style executive space agency capable of deciding where its budget should go, free from political pressure and bureaucratic fads.
The result was the British National Space Centre (BNSC): not quite a Nasa, but for two years it had a dynamic leader in the great Roy Gibson, who had led the European Space Agency (ESA) for a decade.
The good news was that the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence were keen. The bad news: both were run by people aligned with the so-called “wets” so Mrs Thatcher was never fully on board.
“When I left, everyone [in Whitehall] took their football back,” said Gibson, who turned 100 last year.
Labour replaced the BNSC with UKSA in December 2009. Fast forward 15 years, and let’s marvel at what the National Audit Office found there.
The agency had a £1.75 bn budget over its final three years, but in its wisdom simply passed most of this – some 85pc – along to the ESA.
There is a logic to this as there are three space superpowers remaining – the US, China and the ESA – and to get something out of the ESA, you have to put something in.
We got work on the Mars Rover, a significant project, and ESA’s Jupiter orbiter, “Juice”, out of this relationship. But the NAO didn’t think that was fair.
“The UK does not yet receive contracts from ESA proportionate to the value of the funding UKSA provides,” it reported.
The NAO also found that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, its parent, “does not fully understand the Government’s overall funding to and requirements for the space sector.”
And after all this time, UKSA still didn’t “currently have a complete view of how it is progressing against its priorities, but is working to develop one”.
The quango had developed two strange obsessions, too.
One was with exporting regulation, telling the rest of the world how to do space. “We’ve got no clout here with the US and China,” says one insider.
Another calls it “a classic desk jockey’s ambition, and nothing to do with space technology – but it does allow them to go to lots of space conferences”.
Even more bizarre was the obsession with British “space ports”, domestic launch sites like the grandly named Shetland Space Centre at SaxaVord, which one source describes as “a 20-acre car park”.
The Shetland Space Centre at SaxaVord has been described as ‘a 20-acre car park’ - SaxaVord/PAThere’s a reason that we used RAAF Woomera in South Australia in our rocketry heyday, and not the windy and stormy British Isles, with its saturated airspace. And simple physics explains why launches take place at the equator, to use the Earth’s higher rotational velocity as a catapult, making it much cheaper.
Lest we forget, UKSA found millions for the disastrous Virgin Orbit adventure, which fired a rocket from a converted airliner into the Atlantic Ocean, before filing for bankruptcy last year.
UKSA also approved the sale of Inmarsat to a US rival, but opposed further investment in OneWeb, which had cracked the problem of providing satellite navigation from low-Earth orbit, and had customers queuing up to use it.
Both lost us potential manufacturing.
Apart from on X, where a handful of poorly informed but very online declinists grieved the end of the quango like professional mourners at a funeral, UKSA won’t be missed.
The Government has always wanted to be part of the space future, but never wanted to fork out the money or work out how to do it, Whitehouse notes today.
Gibson tells a story of being addressed by a deputy secretary in SW1. “I would like to see an argument why money wouldn’t be better spent in the shoe industry in Northampton,” the mandarin told him.
It was always so, and with the country now flat broke, a bigger UK space sector seems more remote than ever.
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