Space entrepreneurs to oversee British satellite launches from the sofa

Lockheed Martin's Tom Skirrow (L) and Nick Smith at the Harwell facility - John Lawrence

British space entrepreneurs will be able to monitor satellite launches from the comfort of their own sofas using a mission control room being built in Oxfordshire.

The remotely accessible site is being developed by Lockheed Martin at the former UK Atomic Energy Agency facility in Harwell, near Didcot, as part of the country's scramble to join the space race.

Tom Skirrow, a senior project engineer based at the site, said: “In theory, you can [connect] into it from anywhere.”

Harwell is one of Innovate UK’s so-called “catapults”, a technology incubator intended to help space-focused start-ups grow to the point where they are self-sustaining. The site’s facilities are owned and managed by the Satellite Applications Catapult.

Its expansion forms part of government plans to grow the £16.4bn UK space sector. Ministers announced an ambitious project in the mid-2010s for Britain to secure 10pc of the global space market by 2030. Dominant spacefaring nations at present include the US, Russia and China.

Lockheed Martin satellite facility at Harwell - John Lawrence

To make its part of the Harwell facility attractive to space start-ups, Lockheed Martin’s UK space division will be offering remote access to satellite telemetry – data gathered from in-orbit satellites and beamed back to Earth.

Connections to the mission control suite are made over a virtual private network (VPN), Mr Skirrow explained. This allows secure remote connections to be made to computer servers from anywhere in the world, protecting commercially sensitive data from unauthorised access.

Nik Smith, director of Lockheed’s UK space division, added: “This idea of being able to collaborate in an area like this, as part of a mission operations centre, becomes incredibly important.”

The Harwell site’s facilities are focused on “cubesats”, smaller craft whose lower cost makes them suitable for companies hoping to test out new technology.

Britain has not launched a homegrown space rocket since the early 1970s, when Ted Heath’s government cancelled the Black Arrow project. Just one UK satellite was launched atop a UK rocket, from a base in Woomera, Australia.

There are currently seven planned space launch sites across the UK, ranging from Newquay Airport in Cornwall where Virgin Orbit is based with a modified Boeing 747, to Saxa Vord, home to an RAF radar station on the most northerly of the Shetland Islands.