The Catapult exists because the British space sector's value is mostly downstream, in services built on satellite data, sold to customers who have no interest in orbits and no vocabulary for discussing them.
Its useful function is translation. An insurer, a farmer, a water company or a port operator has a question. Somewhere there is a data product, or a combination of them, that bears on it. Establishing whether that is true, and at what cost and confidence, is precisely the kind of work that falls between a space company's remit and a customer's expertise.
The Harwell campus concentration matters here. Being on a site with the European Space Agency's UK presence, the national space agency and a considerable cluster of companies means the introductions that would otherwise take a quarter can happen over a week.
For hardware teams the Catapult is less central, though its work on ground segment, operations tooling and mission concept development is genuinely applied rather than advisory.
Capabilities
- Earth observation application development
- Ground segment and operations tooling
- Mission concept and feasibility studies
- Position, navigation and timing resilience
- Data product validation against ground truth
- Market and route-to-service assessment
Ways in
The routes that exist, and what each is suited to.
Feasibility and application studies
Short, funded pieces of work establishing whether satellite data can answer a specific commercial question, and what accuracy is realistic.
Facility and testbed access
Access to operations facilities, data infrastructure and testbeds for teams developing ground segment or downstream services.
Consortium building
Assembling the several parties a space application usually requires — data provider, domain expert, end customer — into something a funder will support.
How to approach them
Come with the commercial question rather than the technology. The most productive conversations here begin with a decision somebody needs to make and work backwards to whether a satellite can inform it.
Be prepared for the answer to be no, or to be yes at an accuracy that does not support your business case. Establishing that cheaply is the service.
Known for
- Earth observation services developed for agriculture, insurance and infrastructure monitoring
- Methane and emissions detection applications built on existing satellite data
- Support for a considerable number of downstream space companies now trading independently