To innovate for a better world, empowered by space.
Who we are
The Satellite Applications Catapult exists to grow the UK space sector and, as satellite applications become increasingly fundamental to many sectors, to grow the UK economy.
Our work is focused on four key missions. These represent areas of great opportunity for the UK space sector and wider UK economy, areas where we have existing UK expertise and strong academic and commercial capability, and where the Catapult can play a clear role in solving the most immediate or pressing challenges:
- Beyond Earth: focused on making the UK a leading player in the developing in-orbit economy
- Connected and Autonomous Earth: integrating satellite communications into the communications and automation sectors to deliver the robust, ubiquitous connectivity needed to unlock the digital economy, provide elements of critical national infrastructure and provide precise PNT and other capabilities needed by next-gen autonomous systems.
- Sustainable Earth: the UK satellite sector has key strengths in sustainability, especially around geospatial intelligence. This mission is helping to turn these strengths into solutions to help businesses to predict and mitigate future climate and environment shocks to their operations, and which provide the information and analysis the UK and other governments need to develop effective environmental policy and enforcement systems.
What we do
To deliver on our goal to grow the UK space sector, our activities fall into three broad categories:
Business Support – We support businesses in the sector directly with access to facilities, technical experts and help with starting, commercialising and scaling up a business.
Collaborative Projects and Programmes – We play key roles in collaborative and commercial R&D projects, often taking technology risks which other companies were not able or willing to do.
Increasing Market Adoption – We stimulate market demand for satellite services by bringing together suppliers and end-users in areas where satellites can make a real difference.
Why we do it
The Satellite Applications Catapult was established in 2013, and is part of a network of nine Catapults in high-growth areas of the UK economy. Together with the other Catapults, we are dedicated to boosting our national capability and promoting growth in strategically important areas of innovation and technology. We take a commercial approach to the provision of services but reinvest our profits for the good of the sector.
We focus on the development and application of Space related technologies, and contribute to the delivery of the National Space Strategy’s vision and goals. We drive innovation, leverage space and space-related technologies to create opportunities to grow the UK economy, promote Britain’s reputation and values overseas, deliver tangible benefits for our people and communities, and contribute to solving the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st Century.
In common with other Catapults, we are funded through a combination of core grant funding from Innovate UK, collaborative R&D funding and commercial income. We invest to advance new and emerging technologies, shouldering risks that would be too great for commercial organisations, particularly small and medium sized enterprises.