SCOTTISH innovation and Scottish business crop up in the most unexpected places. One of these was the Building Bridges 2023 summit in Geneva, Switzerland, last month, an annual week of conferences and seminars on sustainable finance.
“One of the key elements of Scotland’s rich space industry is its ability to do it all – from building to launching to data analysis,” said Allan Cannon, CEO and co-founder at Krucial and one of the speakers at Building Bridges 2023. “Our upstream ecosystem is strong as is the downstream element .” He said: “We have a highly educated workforce, with world-class institutions such as the University of Strathclyde right on our doorstep, while the expertise to have spilled out of the early days of space start-ups, including Clyde Space, has resulted in more and more innovative companies starting up in Scotland, resulting in a truly world-class space economy.”
A key advantage of satellite sensing is that it enables tracking of environmental, and sometimes even social, impacts in real time, impartially and objectively, even if the area under surveillance is remote and difficult to monitor in any other way. Scotland does appear to be growing just the kind of infrastructure that can boost entrepreneurship in space science, as in other areas.