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The Space Economy (UK Engagement with Space Committee Report)

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton of Upholland, and the whole committee for this extremely enthusiastic report. I suspect I will be taking a different perspective from every other speaker in this debate because I am going to start from down here on solid earth—a planet that we have comprehensively trashed and where we have exceeded seven of our nine planetary boundaries as identified by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. We talk about what is happening up in space, but what we do up there has huge impacts down here on earth. I start from the proposition that Britain’s place in space, both the activity happening from our own land and our global diplomatic and other efforts, needs to keep that in mind.

There are useful things that we can do from space. We can see how fast the Amazon is being destroyed and how fast the peat-lands of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are suffering. We can watch the depletion of water aquifers. All these things are important for us to understand what we are doing, and we need to use space to do that, but we also do not have to do everything we possibly could do in space. We have choices, just as we have choices about whether we use huge amounts of energy and water for data centres for so-called artificial intelligence.

We need to think before we act. Some noble Lords may recall the cautionary tale of the UK’s first military satellite, Skynet 1A. It was launched in 1969 but in the mid-1970s it was deliberately moved because it was no longer in use, and it is now in an inconvenient orbit. No one can find the records of where and how that was done or the whole circumstances. There is one man in his 80s who was probably the person responsible but can no longer remember the details. We need to think about the long-term impacts of what we do, not just throw things up in the short term and think we can forget about them.

As has already been alluded to, we are already crowding space. I note that in 2021 the G7 leaders’ summit in Cornwall was debating the sustainable use of space. Back then—it will have only got worse—85% of the 28,000 routinely tracked objects in earth orbit were debris that no longer served a purpose. Just as the oceans swirl with our junk, so does near space.

The report acknowledges in paragraph 315, on page 95, that one of the foremost challenges of the ongoing space economy is the threat of the so-called

Kessler event, the case where one satellite explodes or has an impact and then sends debris into a wide field, which expands and expands. That brings up another important point that we need to consider: relying on things in space means relying on services and operations from that fragile environment. While I was doing the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme, I learned that all our traffic lights are timed from space. Just think of that in the context of a Kessler event. That is just one small example of the impact that it could have. Relying on space is something we have to think about when we think about our resilience and security.

There are also the environmental pollution impacts. Every year, 100 to 200 tonnes of hardware that is out of control re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere. The impact, should it land on a major city, would of course be significant, but wherever it lands it has impacts. In June 2025, after an Elon Musk SpaceX rocket exploded after launch, in Mexico there were die-offs of fish, dolphins and sea turtles. Just this week the Australian Space Agency has identified the likely source of mysterious large balls that washed up on a beach north of Townsville. They are thought to be space debris from pressure vessels on a space launch vehicle. Crews in protective suits were placing the spheres in hazmat barrels under police guard. This is a risk and an environmental concern.

There is an important point in the report that I need to stress. In paragraph 251, the report notes that the third pillar of the EU Space Act, announced in June 2025, is sustainability, and that

“operators must reduce the environmental impact of their activities in space”.

This is one element where I have to question what the committee is proposing. There is a suggestion in here that we as a non-EU member—for the moment, anyway—might find a competitive advantage by having lower environmental standards. I hope the Minister will reassure me that that is not the direction we would want to take. I note that the committee notes in paragraph 255 that if we did have lower standards than the EU, that would impose costs on operators in doing those things.

Let us think before we act. We have not done that with so much of what we have done on earth, on this planet. Let us think before we act in space.

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