DBT Head of Space Joshua Broom: UK has ‘more ministers working on space’ than ever

The UK Department for Business and Trade’s head of space, Joshua Broom, has shared an update on the space sector’s importance under the new government.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the new industrial strategy under the new government, and that work is well underway,” Broom said, speaking at 2024 Space-Comm Expo Scotland in Glasgow on Thursday.

Joshua Broom said that while he can’t reveal specifics, “a lot of work” has already gone into discovering which levers the government can deploy to drive innovation in space, bolster the UK economy, and protect national security.

“With the new government, we’ve got more ministers working on space in the UK government than ever before,” he noted. 

Broom said that having numerous ministers across numerous remits collaborating closely with the space sector, challenges on both sides can be addressed more effectively.

“We can see the ambition from the new government to work across portfolios and across remits, to address some of those challenges of connecting the academic and the R&D base, with the manufacturing, the commercialisation base”.

He also said it was clear that the “primary mission” for the new government’s space industry collaboration is economic growth.

Joshua Broom on international cooperation

Meanwhile, a key target for the UK’s space strategy is deeper integration with overseas allies, Broom said.

“We’re in a much more geopolitically complex global environment than we have been since the Cold War,” Broom explained. “We’ve got war in Ukraine, we’ve got challenges in the Middle East. We’ve got other state actors operating outside the norms and the behaviors that we’ve seen stand the test of time for 70, 80, years.”

With this, Broom said the UK space players need to “lift our game” when it comes to collaborating “at speed” with our international counterparts, and that the government is “very keen” to do so.

He also shared that due to such geopolitical complexities in recent years, the United States has started “adopting new doctrines”, to become more collaborative with allies including the UK and Australia, in both civil and military contexts.

Broom’s comments follow a similar sentiment to what was shared by the European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency at Space Comm on Wednesday. 

ESA agrees

Speaking on a panel at the inaugural 2024 Space-Comm Expo Scotland in Glasgow on Wednesday, UK Space Agency chief of staff Dr Sarah Jane Gill reiterated UKSA’s primary goals of boosting prosperity, understanding the universe, and protecting the planet and outer space, and noted that global counterparts strive to reach the same goals. 

“We were in Egypt last week attending a conference about space in the Middle East and Africa,” she said, “and what we have found is that wherever in the world we go, our ambitions are the same and our challenges are the same,” she said. 

Meanwhile, Dr David Parker, former CEO of the UK Space Agency and current development manager for the European Space Agency’s European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications, revealed that international co-operation, while essential, is “certainly not easy”.

He revealed an anecdote about how relations with China have changed dramatically in the span of 10 years, and noted that “things and perspectives change.” Read more here.