Welcome to The OuterSpark, here I make sense of the space industry one week at a time: what's being built, who's building it, and how you get in!
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Last week I wrote about how I got into the space sector. This week, I focus on what I found once I was inside. The two are quite different, and the second is less flattering.
3 Things Nobody Told Me About the UK Space Sector
1. The bottleneck is never the technology
I've watched excellent ideas die in this country!
They died in the committees and the beuracratics. Because three departments had to agree and one had a competing programme. Because a champion moved roles. Because someone had already committed budget to something similar and admitting it would have been awkward.
If you're technical, you've been trained to believe the hard part is making the thing work. So when it works and nothing happens, it's disorienting. You start assuming you got the technology wrong.
You didn't. You hit the organisation!
Treat internal politics as a real constraint, planned around like your technology roadmap. Know who actually signs off, not who's in charge by their title. Find out what the person you're pitching is measured on, because that's what they can say yes to. Learn that "we love this, let's stay in touch" usually means no budget authority. But if it is ambiguous, don’t be afraid to be direct and ask ‘are you the budget holder and the final decision maker for this?’.
Longevity can help especially companies that are publicly funded will often go through restrucutres. So, a lot of what looks like luck is just someone who doesn’t stop and simply go away.
2. Being good is not enough
The UK space sector is small. The same few hundred people, the same rooms, the same review boards. In a network that size, opportunities get allocated on familiarity. When someone needs a name for a consortium, a panel, a role, they think of who they know and who they've recently seen being competent.
If nobody can picture you, you're not in the running. However good your work is!
This is the biggest thing holding back early-career people, and it hits the most technically capable hardest, because there's a belief that visibility is unserious and good work speaks for itself. It doesn't. It gets spoken for, by someone who remembers you.
Be visible where decisions get made. Not LinkedIn generally. The working groups and consortium days where the people who allocate things are standing around with coffee.
Be easy to recommend. People pass on those they can describe in one sentence. Pick a lane and be legible.
Say yes to the unglamorous asks. Chairing a session, writing up a workshop. It gets you known by people well above your job title. But always spin it as your success!
A lot of these things that I am talking about here, I’ve observed directly and read in the The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. This is one of my favourite books and I have listened to this audiobook at least 5 times. Take it as a field guide to how people behave, not a manual for how you should. The more you listen to the examples and think about them, the more you will start observing these phenomenon at your work place, and at point you will know exactly what to do!
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green
2. "Build it and they will come" doesn't work here
The build-first model has logic in the US, where capital is deep enough to raise on a technical story and find the customer later. The UK isn't that. Funding here is tighter and far more justification-driven. Every pound arrives with a business case someone has to defend in a room.
So technical superiority alone buys very little. I've watched the better technology lose to the better-explained technology!
And this is what I want you to remember. The skill that compounds here is communication. Business development, networking, speaking, writing. Being the person who makes non-specialists understand why this matters, in words they can repeat to their own boss after you leave.
That's the whole game! Your pitch doesn't need to convince the person in front of you. It needs to survive being retold, badly, in a meeting you're not in.
My test is the five-year-old test. Can you explain your technology to a bright child? Not dumbed down, just stripped of jargon. If you can't, you don't understand it as well as you think.
Another fantastic book I would recommend here is Talk Like Ted by Carmine Gallo. The author extensively researched the best TED speakers ever and breaksdown everything to allow you to do the same. Masterful communication is a skill that will help you in every area of your life.
Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo.
Try it this week. One paragraph on what you do without any acronyms. Harder than it sounds, and the highest-return hour you'll spend on your career.
Three Space News From This Week 💡
Something I picked up from eight years inside this industry, which you won't find it in a press release:
First French woman to walk in space. ESA's Sophie Adenot spent 6 hours 23 minutes outside the ISS on 18 August with NASA's Anil Menon, replacing a failed antenna that carries comms to mission control. They removed the old one but ran out of time to fit the new one, because the cables took longer than planned. The contingency plan for not finishing was written before launch. Read
A drug factory in orbit got its first real contract. Redwire's SpaceMD has booked an entire SpaceX Starfall capsule for 2028, carrying 32 units that grow drug crystals in weightlessness, where they form more evenly than on Earth. First time anyone has booked a whole dedicated mission rather than hitching a ride, and it lands ahead of the ISS retiring around 2030. Read
China landed a booster on legs. LandSpace's Zhuque-3 reached orbit on 19 August and brought its first stage back to a pad in Gansu eight minutes later. Third private company anywhere to do this, after SpaceX and Blue Origin. They plan to actually reuse a stage on flight four. Read
Upcoming Deadlines & Events
If you're working on getting into space, or building something in it, here are some upcoming deadlines that you should know of:
Deadlines
UK: UK Space Agency C-LEO Call 3, Stage One closes midday Monday 7 September. £42m for satellite comms tech.
Europe: ESA Future Navigation Demonstrators, open call. Ideas in before 30 September for the next selection round.
US: NSF America's Seed Fund, full proposals 4 November. You need an invited Project Pitch first, which takes one to two months, so pitch now.
US: NASA SBIR/STTR, rolling topic batches through to September 2027. Sign up for alerts.
India: IN-SPACe Seed Fund (up to ₹1 crore) and Technology Adoption Fund. Open in batches, so register on the portal and watch.
Events
Space for Inspiration (ESA): 1 to 2 September, Copenhagen
UK Earth Observation Conference : 15 to 17 September, University of Warwick
UK Space Power Conference: 23 and 24 September, IET Savoy Place, London
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Till next time!
Ricky
