The British National Space Centre (BNSC) is a British government body that coordinates civil space activities. It operates as a voluntary partnership of ten British government departments and agencies and research councils. The civil portion of the British space programme focuses on space science, Earth observation, satellite telecommunications, and global navigation (for example GPS and Galileo). The latest version of the UK civil space strategy which defines the goals of BNSC was published in February 2008 [3]
Rather than being a full space agency as maintained in some other countries, BNSC HQ comprises of around thirty civil servants on rotation from the partners. DIUS is the 'host' department and provides the central policy staff including the Director General. The present DG, Dr. David Williams, is the first to have been externally appointed. Much of Britain's yearly space budget of £207 million was contributed by the Department of Trade and Industry (until the DTI was broken up in 2007) or controlled by the partnership rather than the BNSC, and over half of that budget flows directly to the European Space Agency.[4] BNSC staff represent the UK at the various programme boards of ESA and also its governing Council. The budget for BNSC headquarters is approximately US$1 million.[5]
The BNSC partnership is the second largest financial contributor to the General Budget of ESA, to its Science Programme and to its robotic exploration initiative the Aurora Programme. Investments are also made in the ESA telecommunications programme 'ARTES' in order to develop payload technology used, for example, in the satellites of Inmarsat, the UK based mobile satellite operator. The BNSC partnership is co-funding a private sector project led by Avanti Communications[3] to build a satellite called HYLAS [8] to provide broadband communications to rural and remote users. Current projects in the field of space science include LISA Pathfinder, for which UK industry is the prime contractor and UK universities are building key payload elements, the astrometry Gaia mission, for which UK industry is supplying the detectors, avionics, software and data processing electronics, and the James Webb Space Telescope, for which a UK consortium led by the UK Astronomy Technology Centre is building the European part of the Mid Infra Red Instrument (MIRI)[4]. The UK has contributed the SPIRE instrument for the Herschel Space Observatory and detector and cooling system technology for the Planck Surveyor cosmic microwave background mission. In the field of Earth observation, projects include the ADM-Aeolus wind profiling mission, for which UK industry is the prime contractor and Cryosat 2 which is led by UK scientist Professor Duncan Wingham of University College, London. Recent BNSC activities include the Mosaic small satellite programme, which led to the launch of the TopSat high resolution EO mission and also the Disaster Monitoring Constellation.
In November 2008, BNSC announced new contributions to ESA and an agreement in principle to establish an ESA centre at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire[9]. In February 2009, BNSC, ESA and Reaction Engines Limited announced a public-private partnership funding scheme to demonstrate key technologies of the SABRE engine for the proposed Reaction Engines Skylon spaceplane[10].
^BNSC - How we work, BNSC website, retrieved 9 March 2007: "In the year 2005-6, BNSC's partners spent £207 million on space programmes - about 65% of which was the UK's contribution to European Space Agency projects like Cassini-Huygens, Envisat and Galileo."
