Space Cluster Partnership funding call 2023
The UK Space Agency invites proposals to its funding call to strengthen the UK’s national space ecosystem through pan-regional or capability-focused space cluster partnerships.
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The UK Space Agency invites proposals to its funding call that will provide grant funding to strengthen the UK’s national space ecosystem and grow the space sector by:
- Enabling local space sectors across the UK to develop stronger relationships with geographically-adjacent nations or regions
- Strengthening ties between the space sectors of multiple regions and/or nations of the UK by facilitating collaboration to develop and/or enhance common or complementary capabilities
The United Kingdom has a rich heritage of world-leading businesses located around the country. Our cities, towns and rural areas all have competitive advantages that will be essential to shaping our economic future.
The government’s ambition set out in the National Space Strategy is to grow and level up the UK’s space economy and make the UK one of the most attractive countries for space-sector businesses of all sizes. This includes building an agile, connected space ecosystem that will provide the ideal environment for space businesses to start-up and flourish, and for bigger high-value, high-impact opportunities to emerge, such as large-scale, multi-sector technology clusters and foreign direct investments (FDIs).
The UK Space Agency has previously delivered a range of interventions to grow this ecosystem. This includes encouraging space businesses, universities, infrastructure, local government, and economic development bodies to ‘cluster,’ and in doing so drive the growth of their local space sector and space capabilities through collaboration. Space Clusters have emerged across the UK to facilitate this collaboration, at various levels of maturity, and are supporting the UK’s nations and regions to set local strategic priorities in space aligned to their strengths, promoting inward investment, and delivering projects that tackle local barriers to sector growth.
To further support the development of a connected, whole-UK space ecosystem, this funding call aims to support space clusters and other defined geographic areas of space activity to establish, or deepen, collaborative relationships with each other. Cross-cluster partnership and collaboration will accelerate the development of the thriving, resilient and well-connected ecosystem the UK needs to achieve its space ambitions, realise the full economic potential of space across the UK, and proactively deliver the government’s wider economic priorities.