Artist’s rendition of a satellite – paulfleet/123RF Stock

We’re looking at two new space strategies this week, for China and Wales!

China has released a white paper looking at achievements and what to expect in the next five years. Wales has released it’s first space strategy, and looks at the current and potential capabilities the country can offer the space industry. Whilst the two are very different in terms of their space experience and capabilities, there are similarities in areas of focus.

China

At the end of January the white paper ‘China’s Space Program: A 2021 Perspective’ was published by the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China. This outlined the achievements of the Chinese Space programme to date, and looked at the main objectives for the coming five years across six areas:

• Space Transport System
• Space Infrastructure
• Manned Spaceflight
• Deep Space Lunar Exploration
• Experiments on New technologies
• Space Environment Governance

Focusing on Earth Observation (EO), which is within the Space Infrastructure category, the paper highlighted the recent completion of the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS) as a key achievement providing high spatial and temporal resolution data. The Chinese EO capabilities include:

• multi-mode imaging and hyperspectral satellites, together with a burgeoning commercial satellite sector
• supported applications include land and ocean observation, environmental disaster support and weather forecasting
• improved ground infrastructure to improve the speed and efficiency of data processing

In the coming five years, the country aims to improve integration between remote sensing, communications, navigation and positioning technologies, and in particular will look to:

• Develop satellites for geostationary microwave monitoring, new-type ocean colour observation, carbon monitoring of the territorial ecosystem, and atmospheric environmental monitoring;
• Develop dual-antenna X-band interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), land & water resources and other satellite technology, for comprehensive global coverage; and
• Continue to improve the ground infrastructure for remote-sensing satellites

The paper also highlighted the importance of EO in resource management, environmental monitoring, climate change and weather forecasting, but it also highlighted the social applications such as supporting public services, urbanisation, coordinated regional development, and poverty eradication. It was highlighted that EO data was used by almost all national and regional departments for disaster monitoring, and it provides data to over 100 countries having distributed over 100 million images, with Australia and Japan known to use this data.

Wales

Yesterday the Welsh Government unveiled its National Space Strategy for Wales, entitled ‘Wales: A Sustainable Space Nation’. The overall ambition is to develop a space economy worth around £2 billion per year by 2030. It highlighted the current, and potential, space sectors in Wales encompassing:

• Space launch, training and experience capability such as the Spaceport Snowdonia, and the Port Talbot Space Centre for sea-based launches.
• Network of research and teaching facilities including
• Existing and developing strengths in EO including sensors, analysis and integration with other data sources such as the hyperspectral imaging systems at the OpTIC  Technology Centre, Living Wales
• Focus on clean energy, sustainability and the green agenda.
• Test and evaluation facilities, including Llanbedr and Aberporth Range, Radnor Range and Pendine, which is open to both military and civil use.
• Advanced manufacturing capability and technology clusters, together with a developing capacity for in-space manufacturing.
• An environment that offers opportunities, and challenges, to the downstream application market.

For each of the above areas, the strategy identifies their current strengths, the future potential and a series of actions the Welsh Government will instigate. For EO specifically, the strategy highlighted strengths such as:

• Hyperspectral imaging systems at the Glyndwr Innovations OpTIC Technology Centre
• Aberystwyth University, which is a centre of excellence in research and teaching relating to EO.
• Environment Systems, a commercial organisation based in Aberystwyth, who have a long track record of using EO – a company we know well, having worked on previous projects with them.
• Data related capabilities such as NDEC (National Digital Exploitation Centre), could support the processing of EO data.

In terms of the future, the intention for EO is to support commercial companies grow their exports and expand their capabilities in the use of artificial intelligence. The first action is to establish a specialist Earth Observation Group with representatives to develop detailed proposals for growing the sector, including the potential establishment of a National Wales Space Observatory.

It is always interesting to see how different countries are looking to develop their space industry and EO in particular. However, we going to finish with the statement from the China strategy, that we felt summed everything up brilliantly, namely ‘The space industry helps to improve people’s lives.’