Andrew George

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) on setting out the important case for the role of the space sector in the UK economy. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Congleton (Sarah Russell), who outlined the importance and significance of the totemic Jodrell Bank. Likewise, I will refer to an important and growing contributor to the space sector in my own constituency at Goonhilly—people have different ways of saying that, with some preferring a phonetic pronunciation—on the Lizard peninsula. In the early 1960s, the Post Office established a telecommunications and satellite base there that became a British Telecommunications base. In 2014, it was taken over by Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd, a local company that is cutting a significant reputation in the space sector. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Wyre Forest for mentioning Newquay as a potential launch site. All those experiments are important. They may come with failures along the way, but as he said, we learn from things that do not go fully to plan to improve our technologies. There will be successes and failures at the cutting edge of the space sector, but we will learn from that process. When I previously represented St Ives, before my nine-year sabbatical from this place, it took four or five years to get Goonhilly Earth Station on to the former BT site in 2014. Since then, it has been doing incredibly well, despite a difficult start on a small base. It has regenerated the site and generated a reputation as a place with world-leading capability. Its core business is deep space research and activity, as well as commercial and defence-focused communication services. It is currently supporting missions around Mars and observing solar weather, and it provided communications and support to enable last year’s private moon landing. The space sector is important to the UK economy, but we cannot take a “little England” approach to global communications because Earth turns on its axis and exists in a wider universe. In that context, as the hon. Member for Wyre Forest said, the positioning, navigation and timing—the PNT—of our sites in relation to the global sphere in which space science is being advanced is important. Goonhilly is in a critical location for tracking and managing satellites. The UK is an important geographic location from that point of view, but of course the context is one in which it has to establish contracts with companies and nations around the world.