Meeting of the Parliament 27 April 2023
Daniel Johnson outlines an important challenge. As the sector grows, so will the demand for people. In the past few days, the industry made the important point to me that the sector will require a variety of skilled workers, from welders to engineers and scientists. It is important that the skills system adapts to the needs of many of Scotland’s growing sectors. A review is under way and steps are being taken.
There has been enormous change. The main change is in the size of satellites, which have gone from being as big as double-decker buses to being as small as a shoe box. The cost has dropped from tens of millions of pounds to hundreds of thousands of pounds, and the time to design, build and deploy a satellite has reduced from between 10 and 20 years to six months.
As I found out during my visits yesterday, Glasgow is at the heart of that transformation. An industry that had two people in a room now has numerous companies, which employ hundreds of highly skilled satellite engineers and build more small satellites than any other place outside of California. There I was by the Clyde, in a place famous for building the world’s ocean-going vessels, holding in my hand the small space vessels that are being built there in the 21st century to support humankind and protect our planet. Those satellites now track global aviation and shipping, forecast the weather and help to prevent forest fires in the Amazon.
However, satellites are valuable only if they can provide the right data at the right time to support effective decision making. Scotland also has expertise in data gathering and analysis. Scotland is the data capital of Europe, with Edinburgh hosting Europe’s largest infomatics centre and more than 170 data science companies.
We also have a number of excellent downstream data companies that are monitoring the earth’s forests and crops, making peer-to-peer trading much fairer and easier and delivering precise positioning services on a global scale to an accuracy of less than 5cm. That will, in turn, aid autonomous vehicles, precision agriculture and the internet of things.
Those capabilities provide a wealth of opportunities, but what will set Scotland apart will be a full end-to-end value chain—a one-stop shop for small satellites.