Oxfordshire is known for its technology innovation, and home to key research institutions that include the UK’s centre for fusion energy at Culham and the thriving quantum computing cluster around the National Quantum Computing Centre at Harwell. Smaller towns in the region, including Bicester and Banbury, have reinvented themselves as leading centres of advanced manufacturing. Active sectors for advanced manufacturing within Oxfordshire include: advanced materials, aerospace, analytics machinery and equipment, autonomous vehicles, batteries, electric vehicles, in-space manufacturing, life sciences, renewable energy, and robotics.

With 105 space organisations employing over 1,400 space professionals, Harwell Space Cluster is the UK’s largest, and Europe’s most concentrated group of space companies.

Companies within Harwell’s Space Cluster range from start-ups to multinationals such as Thales Alenia, Astroscale and Lockheed Martin.

It includes major assets of national and international significance such as the European Space Agency’s European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications (ECSAT) and the new National Satellite Test Facility: the UK’s first space-simulating environment that will support the assembly, integration testing of space payloads and satellites weighing up to seven tonnes.

The Satellite Applications Catapult brings SMEs, industry, end users and researchers together to accelerate satellite applications growth.