Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 139)
WEDNESDAY 10 JANUARY 2007
DR DAVID
WILLIAMS, MISS
PAULA FREEDMAN
AND DR
ARWYN DAVIES
Q120 Dr Iddon: Helen Sharman is the
only British citizen to have flown as a British citizen and unfortunately
the rest of the British astronauts, the latest being Piers Sellers,
had to fly under another national flag. Do you think that is right?
Why can we not get some collaboration worldwide so that the British-born
astronauts can fly as British-born astronauts?
Dr Williams: Whether that will
emerge in the future is to be seen. At the present time, there
are four capabilities in manned space, the Russian, the American,
the Chinese and the European Space Agency. The UK decided not
to join the European Space Agency's manned programme in 1986 and
successively nobody has challenged that in government and changed
that decision. There are lots of reasons why we did not join it,
but one of them was because you would have to be involved in everything
associated with it. If, in 40 years' time, things change or in
20 years' time the system changes and there is a global astronaut
corps, then it could be looked at at that time.
Q121 Dr Iddon: Can you see that Britain
might return to funding launchers?
Dr Williams: Although we are not
funding launch work, we do find some money for launches and we
do support a share of the Kourou site in French Guiana which is
the area on the launch site which is part of the general facility
of the European Space Agency. We also have a very small stake
in the Ariane 5 programme. I do not see at this stage why the
UK would return to that market area and I think the market for
launches has opened up enormously since the UK decided not to
go major into launches because Ariane 5 was originally a man-operated
launcher, but it is not anymore because we now have the Russian
market opening up, the Chinese launchers, the Japanese, Indian
launchers and the American launchers as well as the European,
so the launcher market has a large market available. At the present
time, I would say we can buy off the market rather than go back
into development.
Q122 Dr Iddon: Some other people
would say that we have missed out.
Dr Williams: Some other people
would say that we have missed out and I would accept that. I think
what you have to look at is, when you decide how much money you
spend on science in general and how much money you spend on space,
you have to be selective about what you do, so you do what you
do well. The UK has been very, very good at being selective. Some
people have lost out because it has not been their area, but other
people have benefited enormously and we have been very good over
the last 20 years at choosing areas and moving into them and being
very successful at doing them. I do have to accept that that has
not satisfied every area, but there are a lot of areas of science
and innovation in the UK that would benefit from more money, but
priorities have to be set.
Q123 Dr Iddon: Can I just examine
how wide your consultation is going to be and whether indeed your
new 2007-10 policy will be a really national UK space policy.
Are you engaging with all the players in the field or just the
partners within your existing partnership for consultation?
Dr Williams: No, the consultation
is absolutely open. It is on the website and anybody can respond
to it. We have taken the precaution of identifying all the industries,
all the universities, all the departments whom we know have an
interest and sent it directly to them so that they do not miss
it en passant, as it were. It is completely open and anybody
who is attracted to the website and picks it up from anywhere
in the world in fact can respond to it.
Q124 Dr Iddon: So you are open to
new ideas?
Dr Williams: We are open to new
ideas, we are open to any ideas and then we will set up a little
project group to take those through, working across the partnership
effectively, to look at what comes in and to try and change it
and convert it into a strategy.
Q125 Dr Iddon: Can I turn to something
quite different now which is the Outer Space Act 1985. Things
have moved on a lot since then, have they not?
Dr Williams: Yes.
Q126 Dr Iddon: I am just wondering
whether you might be recommending at some time in the future that
that Act is looked at again with a view to bringing in a completely
different Act or even renewing the older Act. There are a lot
of things which I might loosely describe as "junk" up
there. Do we regulate space adequately, do you think?
Dr Williams: There is a lot of
junk up there because junk tends to stay a long time and a lot
of the junk is very old, but we do regulate very well. Now, for
any satellite that is launched into an earth orbit, and this has
been so for a number of years, part of the launch philosophy has
got to be what we call a "staged de-orbit mode" so that,
as the satellite reaches the end of its life, you have to have
the mechanism which allows you to send it off into deep space
for eventual disappearance or to bring it back to earth in a controlled
way which will not cause damage in order to minimise the amount
of debris that is left in space. That is an important part of
the Outer Space Act and one that everybody abides by and which
we really need to keep, so I do not see that changing, although
it is not stopping all debris because you cannot stop—
Q127 Dr Iddon: Who is policing that?
Dr Williams: It is a United Nations
Act and it is policed by individual Member States and, on launch,
a requirement of launch is that the launch company cannot launch
the satellite unless it is satisfied that the satellite itself
meets those requirements.
Q128 Dr Iddon: Are there any bandits
ignoring the legislation?
Dr Williams: No, because there
are not many bandits with a launch capability, so that is reasonable.
Q129 Dr Turner: Dr Williams, both
you and Miss Freedman expressed some satisfaction with your current
lobbying access and you thought it was pretty satisfactory, but,
if you set this in the context of the UK investment in space research
as a percentage of its gross national income, we spend very little
on space research, 0.02% for the UK when the ESA average is 0.048%.
It is much less than Germany, much less than France and infinitely
less than the States, so the lobbying process is not producing
much in terms of funding for UK space activity, so do you think
it is acceptable that we should be such poor players in financial
terms?
Dr Williams: The headlines give
those figures. If you look at where we focus and the fact that
we do not do launchers and we do not do manned space, in the area
where we focus we are up there with the rest of Europe which is
behind the USA, so the headline figure masks the way that the
UK is selective about what it does.
Q130 Dr Turner: Does this not put
you at a disadvantage because the rest of Europe see you as piggy-backing
on their efforts? Do they not see you as weaker than everybody
else?
Dr Williams: I would like to think
that at a European level, and it will become more and more so
as Europe expands, it will be impossible for every nation to be
involved in every mission and Europe will need to be more collegiate
about how it approaches satellite and satellite systems and space
systems. Therefore, the concept of subsets of Europe being involved
in one area and subsets in another area will have to become more
and more the vogue as you move to 27 countries because you cannot
split a programme up 27 ways sensibly and efficiently. I think
this idea that we do not do launchers, it is not seen as us piggy-backing,
it is just seen as the way that Europe partitions the work and
the strategic input at a European level.
Q131 Dr Turner: How do you think
the Government views investment in space? Why does it not appear
to have been viewed by the UK Government as strategically important,
especially bearing in mind, I seem to remember from the earlier
evidence we have taken, that small though our investment in space
is, the returns are highly significant?
Dr Williams: It is simply, in
my view, a matter of priority-setting. There is on the science
side a budget for science and within that it is for the science
community to determine how much should be spent on astronomy science
and how much on earth science and, within that, the community
has to decide the best way of doing it. Therefore, by defining
the science budget and looking at the priorities within that,
you define what is done in science. On the societal side, in weather-forecasting,
for example, satellites are indispensable and the budget has gone
up enormously over the last 15 years. On the transport side, transport
is funding, along with DTI and the European Union, a scheme that
in 10 years' time may allow for a more intelligent way of managing
traffic as well as doing other things, and I have already mentioned
the GMES, so it is about priorities. On the commercial side, I
think the past investment by the UK, as the Case for Space has
shown, is reaping enormous economic benefit to the UK and I think
we need to recognise that and see that space is now there in everyday
life in a large number of ways and that we need to keep that moving
and keep helping industry stay in that business.
Q132 Dr Turner: Do you not feel,
given there are considerable economic benefits to be had, that
greater investment might lever yet more economic benefit and would
you, as the BNSC, like to be in control of a single, unified national
space budget?
Dr Williams: In terms of improving
the economic return, again we have to look at it. If you look
at the telecoms area, for example, space systems are a major contributor
to telecoms in traffic, but a lot of the main businesses, what
I call "new economic services", the Vodafones of the
world, they build on the basic infrastructure and the basic infrastructure
is there as, if you like, an underpinning infrastructure technology
to allow these service industries to flourish and blossom. In
satellite television, the UK is one of the biggest countries in
terms of managing that. In what we do, a lot of the benefit is
in that secondary, downstream industry, and in the upstream industry,
we do very well at in the areas we are focused on. Whether by
putting more money into that and whether significantly more money
would increase the market is something that we have to ask industry
to answer and we have to work with industry in making sure that
that is the case before we fund it.
Q133 Dr Turner: Well, you have a
central co-ordinating role in preparing the current CSR bid. Would
you like to tell us something about the headline parts of that
bid.
Dr Williams: The main areas that
we are looking at in terms of space are the national programme,
which I have already mentioned, and PPARC will be looking at the
Aurora programme which is continuing the Mars mission and looking
at what we might do on going to the moon in the interim. On the
societal side, the Global Monitoring initiative is one of the
areas we will be putting a bid in, on the transport side this
time we are doing no more because Galileo is in place, and on
the commercial side we will be looking to work with industry to
identify opportunities to do more underpinning technology and
more early market support for communications and broadcast areas.
Q134 Dr Turner: To what extent are
you able to ensure that, where long-term funding is needed for
projects, it actually happens and that programmes do not suffer
from changes in the funding levels which actually undermine the
effectiveness of those programmes? To what extent are you able
to do that?
Dr Williams: In the European Space
Agency there is almost an inbuilt safeguard there. Once you join
a programme in the European Space Agency, you are legally committed
to continue it until the end of the programme, so, if you start
a programme today, an eight-year programme, you cannot pull out
half-way through. You have to negotiate annually for the budgets
you contribute within a bandwidth, but you cannot leave the programme,
so one of the benefits of the European Space Agency is that, whilst
it may take a long time and be quite difficult to get agreement
to join a programme, once you have joined it you are in it for
its life. The sort of problem you are talking about is at a national
level where funding can fluctuate annually and there we are working
very hard to show that the UK 10-year R&D strategy is an area
that space is important for and that we should be recognised in
that and, therefore, in the 10-year strategy space should have
a baseline activity.
Q135 Dr Turner: I come back to your
lobbying capacity. You have already given evidence that there
are problems with national programmes because of annual fluctuations,
so you really do need to beef up, do you not, the lobbying clout
of the BNSC?
Dr Williams: I think I come back
to the point that it is not just about lobbying loudly and in
the newspaper, it is about working in the system. I am in the
line management of the Office of Science and Innovation working
for Sir Keith O'Nions and it is in that process and the interaction
with the Department of Trade and Industry on the research R&D
budget for OSI and the Treasury where the decisions are made at
the end of the day with ministers. It is working in that system
on a day-to-day basis at official level that I see one of the
strengths of the current mechanism. It is not perfect, let us
not argue that it is perfect, but I am not sure I would be better
off standing outside shouting.
Q136 Dr Turner: It is not at all
transparent, is it, this mechanism?
Dr Williams: It is to the Minister
and to the officials and the people involved in defining budgets.
Dr Turner: That is not what we simple
politicians call "transparency" though.
Q137 Adam Afriyie: Why do you think
the UK spend proportionately less on space investment than the
rest of the world?
Dr Williams: Because it is selective,
full stop. It does not do launchers, it does not do manned space,
it does not do the space station.
Q138 Adam Afriyie: So proportionately,
if you take those activities out, we are on a par?
Dr Williams: We are, yes.
Q139 Adam Afriyie: What is the aim
of the Joint Space Technology Programme?
Dr Williams: The aim of it is
to ensure that over a period of years we maintain a basic capability
in the UK so that we can exploit science space systems to the
commercial and public good and that we can engage at the European
Space Agency level because, in going to the European Space Agency
with a proposal, you have got to have done some homework, you
have got to have shown it is viable and that is where the national
technology programme will come in.
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