Space Industry

Lord Johnson of Marylebone Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, humans can travel in space at 40,000 kilometres an hour, and I will have to speak as fast to deliver my maiden speech and refer to my relevant interests at Harvard, Kings and in Skyrora, in a minute. First, I thank Black Rod, the doorkeepers and my sponsors, my noble friend Lord Risby and the noble Lord, Lord Desai, for helping me acclimatise to an environment that is so similar and yet so different to the Commons, to which I was elected three times, and where I spent 10 increasingly tumultuous years in various roles, including as head of the Policy Unit and as Universities and Science Minister under three different Prime Ministers.

My noble friend Lord Willetts referred to the Space Industry Act, which I had the privilege of taking through the Commons as Space Minister. It received Royal Assent three years ago, yet we are still waiting for the regulatory framework to arrive. We need it fast and we need it to be proportionate, as my noble friend Lord Willetts rightly said. We also need much greater commitment. If we are serious about developing sovereign launch capability, which was one objective of that Act, we need a great much greater commitment to ensuring that it is UK industry that benefits from opportunities from the Act, including launch, not just the usual giant US aerospace companies. We messed this up once before as a country in 1971, when we abandoned our Black Arrow programme after being made promises of free rides for our satellites on US launches. Those offers disappeared and left us the only country to have launched a satellite successfully into orbit and then to have abandoned that independent capability. Let us make a reality of sovereign launch capability and not make those mistakes again.