Rebuilding British Launch Capabilities
A guest post by Fionn O'Connell
I’m always keen to post guest pieces, particularly on subjects I don’t know much about. This piece was prompted by the closure of the UK Space Agency, and Fionn O’Connell gives options for rebuilding launch capabilities in the soon-to-be Anglofuture.
The last and only successful UK-built rocket to place a satellite in orbit was the Black Arrow R3, which launched on 28 October 1971 from Woomera, Australia. Everything since then has used a foreign launch provider or launch vehicle. This leaves the UK with the distinguished title of "only nation to ever develop a successful orbital launch capability and then abandon it".
What would it take to reclaim this capability?
FDI vs Domestic Effort
There are two proposed approaches to this problem:
1. Aggressively invite foreign direct investment by space firms like SpaceX, or Blue Origin.
2. Generate demand for launch capabilities so a domestic space industry crops up.
While I'm personally in favour of (1) I am going to argue for (2) as best I can.
Approach 1 builds on proven methods of achieving industrial development, which is why I favour it. Where nations develop new industrial capabilities they tend to come from one of two sources:
3. Generational companies founded by generational individuals are built in the country developing new industrial capabilities.
4. Foreign firms and executives with experience building these capabilities are brought in.
The UK is actually in a better position than most to hope for (3), but (3) does not constitute an industrial policy, which means if we treat this problem as an industrial development problem the only viable choice is (4).
That, however, comes with some of the issues you sometimes see with FDI based industrial development. For one thing, you might not necessarily find a "buyer" for your tax incentives or planning incentives. For another thing, the "buyer" might not invest sufficiently to actually bootstrap an industrial ecosystem, meaning your policy ends up a tax grift for international corporations. This risk is acute here because technically 2, but realistically 1 "buyer" exists for this program. Blue Origin has successfully launched a satellite into Orbit as of 2025, but the vast vast majority of launches worldwide are conducted by SpaceX. Creating an enormous monetary incentive for SpaceX specifically to invest in the country is great if it works, but embarrassing if the end result is a giant tax handout and corporate welfare binge for the worlds richest man.
Approach (2) borrows from a playbook also advocated by Patrick Collison on carbon capture technology. If you can create sufficient demand for the ecosystem, the ecosystem will organise itself around this source of demand. This demand is actually what we would hope SpaceX can create. The issues with this policy though are twofold.
5. It is not a proven method of industrial development, and so we cannot model the policy after successful policies in Ireland, China, South Korea, or elsewhere.
6. Just like the FDI approach, you may purchase huge amounts of space services but not actually generate enough to create an industrial ecosystem. NASA spending was around 0.7% of US GDP every year from 1965 to 1970. The scale of capital needed may be beyond what's possible with the current government balance sheet.
There are some important reasons to believe the government could in fact achieve this. During Covid, the emergency ventilator program resulted in over 10k ventilators being produced, many of whom were built by companies who had never built a ventilator before. So, if balance sheet constraints were not such a problem and we had 1960s NASA level funding available to us, it is likely the government could create the incentives to reproduce a known technology here in the UK. The problem is, compared to an FDI approach it is not a tried and trusted approach, and it would cost an order of magnitude more.
In the end UKSA was a failure, and in my opinion cutting it did no real harm to our nation, but the motivations for cutting it seem to be a story of losing hope. The abolition did not come with a promise of a renewed space policy, and in the end is indicative of the managed decline we've been living in for 20 years. We need to be a lot bolder if we're going to shake off the malaise and atrophy that, industrially at least, has been at work for 50 years.