Glasgow's Satellite Boom Faces a Billion-Euro Question

In 2005, space engineer Craig Clark returned to his native Glasgow after years of working elsewhere in the UK. He had graduated from university roughly a decade earlier, but at the time the only relevant jobs in his field lay south of the border. Undeterred, Clark decided to build something of his own in the city where he grew up, and he named the venture Clyde Space.

Clark's decision tapped into a heritage that had long defined Glasgow. He had grown up near the River Clyde, where shipbuilding had once made the city an industrial powerhouse, and he absorbed the old saying that the Clyde made Glasgow and Glasgow made the Clyde. What he may not have anticipated was that the same engineering tradition could be reborn in an entirely different form, with the city becoming one of Europe's leading producers of small satellites.

That transformation is now well established. More than two decades after Glasgow's first satellite company was founded, the Scottish Government says more small satellites are manufactured in the city than anywhere else in Europe. The sector's growth has been striking, and it has happened largely without central planning or a grand industrial strategy.

At the heart of Glasgow's success are CubeSats, a class of small spacecraft whose basic building block measures just 10cm by 10cm by 10cm, roughly the size of a Rubik's Cube. These devices are far smaller, cheaper and faster to develop than the large satellites many people imagine, and their modular design allows them to be stacked together and fitted with cameras, sensors, communications gear and other instruments depending on the mission.

Despite their modest size, CubeSats carry considerable significance. Data gathered by satellites of all kinds is increasingly embedded in daily life, supporting communication and navigation, tracking ships and goods, monitoring forests and crops, managing energy networks and helping scientists understand climate change. For governments, such information informs policy decisions and shapes responses to emergencies, which is why space has become an ever more strategically important domain.

Glasgow's rise to this position was not the result of a deliberate plan. One of the key catalysts was Craig Clark's Clyde Space, which specialised in CubeSats at precisely the moment demand for smaller, cheaper spacecraft began to take off. The firm went on to build Scotland's first satellite, UKube-1, and it did so in partnership with the University of Strathclyde, which supplied research expertise and a steady stream of engineering talent.

Other companies soon followed, including Craft Prospect and Alba Orbital, and a genuine space cluster began to take shape. The American satellite company Spire chose Glasgow for its European base in 2015, while smaller businesses emerged and established engineering and technology firms joined the supply chain. Andrew Strain, chief technology officer at AAC Clyde Space, the company formed after Clyde Space was acquired by Sweden's AAC Microtec, says firms moved to Glasgow because it was clearly possible to operate there and an ecosystem was beginning to grow.

According to Daniel Smith, founder of the space marketing firm AstroAgency and the Scottish Government's trade and investment envoy for space, Glasgow eventually hosted an entire small satellite value chain. That chain runs from components and satellite manufacturing through to launch services, spaceports and ground stations, giving the city a breadth of capability that few other locations can match.

The economic benefits extend beyond the companies themselves. A review commissioned by Space Scotland found that space manufacturing alone supported more than 1,000 Scottish jobs in 2022-23, while the wider industry contributed £202m to the Scottish economy. Across Scotland as a whole, the space sector generated £335m in income in 2022-23, an increase of 69 per cent over five years. Excluding traditional satellite television broadcasting, it employed 2,811 people, a rise of 81 per cent over the same period.

As the industry has expanded, so has the pool of knowledge supporting it. The University of Strathclyde now has more than 100 people working across space-related activity, and the subject has become one of the institution's strategic priorities, according to Professor Malcolm Macdonald, its chair of applied space technology. The university works directly with commercial space companies on research and technology development, reinforcing the link between academia and industry that helped launch the cluster in the first place.

Macdonald recalls that when he graduated there was essentially no local space industry for him to join. Today, the situation could scarcely be more different, with graduates leaving the university to take up roles in a thriving domestic sector. That reversal illustrates how quickly Glasgow has built both capacity and reputation.

Yet the city's position is no longer guaranteed. Governments across Europe are committing substantial sums to their own satellite industries, and some of the sector's leading figures warn that this spending could draw investment and jobs away from Glasgow. The question of how Scotland and the UK should respond, and what role the state ought to play in supporting strategically important industries, has therefore become increasingly pressing.

The concern is not that Glasgow has lost its advantages, but that rivals are now investing at a scale that could erode them. Public money can shape where companies choose to grow and where skilled workers settle, and European capitals have made clear they intend to compete hard in space. For a city whose satellite sector grew organically rather than by design, the challenge is whether that organic strength can survive an era of state-backed competition.