Hello and welcome to another episode of In-Orbit, the podcast exploring how
technology from space is empowering a better world, brought to you by
the Satellite Applications Catapult.
I'm your host, Dallas Campbell, and in today's episode we are diving
into the UK Space Agency Unlocking Space for Business Programme,
focusing on its impact on financial services and transport and logistics.
I'm joined in the studio by Sean McCarthy, Head of Market Intelligence at
the Satellite Applications Catapult and remotely, we have Laura Bealin Kelly,
Unlocking Space for Business Project Lead at the UK Space Agency and Jocelyn
Barker, a consultant in PWC's Space Practice with a focus on sustainability.
By tapping into satellite derived data, the financial services and transport
and logistics sector are experiencing a revolution, from optimising supply chains
to enhancing investment strategies, the Unlocking Space for Business Programme
aims to support companies to deliver this growth through the integration of
innovative satellite data and services.
I have in front of me a 28 page document from the UK Space Agency
called Introduction to the Unlocking Space for Business programme.
So where do we start with this?
The Unlocking Space for Business Programme is a new pilot programme run by the UK
Space Agency with delivery partners PWC and the Satellite Applications Catapult
and it's trying to do a couple of things within an 18 month time frame.
It's really trying to get businesses in two particular sectors, so financial
services and transport logistics to understand the value of using
satellite data and services for them.
So trying to kind of support the space sector through supporting businesses.
So we're still working towards catalysing investment into the space
sector, but we're helping businesses to really understand the value of
satellite data and how they can actually use it within their businesses.
Okay, well it sounds reasonable, what kind of businesses?
I mean, when you say businesses, all businesses?
Like if I ran a sandwich shop, is that going to be..?
This particular programme is aimed at the finance sector and
the transport and logistics.
So you've got finance, we look at the banking, insurance, asset
management, that kind of thing and the transport sector is, we're
considering maritime, surface transport, road and rail, that sort of thing.
So we call that...
Not space.
PNT.
Sean's shaking...
Isn't that?
Well, PNT is just Position, Navigation and Timing, so that's like GPS.
But the programme's actually looking at all of the space services.
So it would be Earth Observation, it would be PNT, Position, Navigation and Timing
and SATCOMs and within Earth Observation, you'd have weather data coming from radar
or optical satellites, so it's the whole gambit of satellite technology, really.
And so what is the aim?
Is it to get more companies thinking about using space data?
Like, are not enough companies doing it now?
Well, one of the challenges that is being addressed by the programme is the
fact that quite a lot of space companies have come from technologists who may
not have worked in the banking sector.
So there's a bit of a translation that needs to be made between the technology
and the needs of the banking world or the needs of the finance sector and that's
always proved to be difficult in the past.
So the space agencies come up with this great scheme to help bridge that gap.
Okay, the key word is unlocking, how is it going to be unlocking?
Like, what's the key and how does the mechanism work?
I think there's a couple of things really, I wouldn't say there's one
specific key, there's a couple of keys.
So I think it's as Sean said, some of the kind of the suppliers who are out there
at the moment, they can present solutions in really technical language and that
can be a bit of a barrier sometimes for businesses and actually understanding
how they can use satellite data.
So there's a bit of an education and an awareness raising piece around
what's actually out there, what's available and how it can solve the real
world problems that businesses have.
I think to add to Laura's point, we've kind of, prior to this programme, did
some work to understand the key, I guess the key barriers for organisations to
realise the potential benefits that they can derive from satellite data
and this, from the demand side and from end users, there's definitely this lack
of awareness and misconception as to what satellite opportunities may even
be relevant to their business and I think we'll definitely dive into it
more, but there's almost an infinite number of use cases as more services
become available and a lot of end users who could absolutely benefit from this
still often see space and satellites as too expensive for a start and costs
are hugely reducing and continuing to do so, but also too futuristic.
So when you've got to think, especially from a commercial perspective, in
terms of ROI and how companies can commercially benefit from it, I don't
think that information is necessarily presented to decision makers in a way
that's evidence based, easy to digest, so maybe not as technical as they don't
need to know the real technicalities of it and we love to talk about it
because we all find it very interesting.
It's brilliant and actually on page one of that PDF that is open on
my computer, 17 percent of UK GDP comes from what we do in space.
That's a heck of a chunk and it's a heck of a chunk for people not to
kind of know that's there and is...
If you think of the space services like a utility, like electricity or
gas or water, it's providing data of all different sorts and so many
different organisations are using this.
Well, organisations and individuals, so GPS, communications, Google
Earth is being used by everyone.
Yes, you're right.
Actually, well, this, maybe this is a good point before we sort
of leap into what this particular programme is going to be doing.
Let's think about understanding the satellite ecosystem.
If you are like, we've got satellites up there, what are they doing?
What are the kind of the main big headlines of what satellites do for us?
As we've said, you've got the sort of observing satellites, the remote
sensing satellites, they were...
So cameras in the sky.
Cameras in the sky, but if you think of it more as sensors in the sky
because it's not just optical, it's radar, it's infrared, it's literally a
spectrum of sensors that are up there.
Traditionally, those satellites would have been the big, bus sized satellites
that were sent up by the military or the government or for scientists' use.
But more recently, there's been the new space movement if you like, whereby
things have become commercialised, so companies are sending up satellites and...
So things like Google Earth, those sorts of images of the Earth...
Yes, well actually the Google Earth imagery, a lot of that's coming from some
of the traditional players like Airbus.
But I think the main distinction on the earth observation bit, we're not talking
about the communications piece, so on Earth observation, you've got over a
thousand satellites up there and there, there are a couple of hundred companies
that own the satellites and then there's another ecosystem of the people that
take that data and add value to it and then serve that back to the end users.
So just very briefly while we're on satellite imagery and earth observation,
very briefly, a couple of good examples, just so listeners can visualise what
we're talking about, the types of things that we do with satellite imagery.
There's, I mean, there really is hundreds of use cases when it comes to just Earth
Observation Data because you can see so much and on such huge timescales, I think
that what's so fantastic about using Earth Observation Data is you can date it back,
you have historical data sets so you can compare and contrast changes over time.
I think some key use cases that we've found from, I mean, across transport
logistics and financial services is the use of tracking weather risks and
natural hazard risks, so flood risk, wildfire risk, droughts, you can track
changes in time, you can predict, you can build models and predict how, which
areas might be at risk, what assets might be at risk, and then mitigate that.
For people to visualise this, it would be the imagery you're getting
of forests being burnt down.
You know, and you're seeing these huge scars, and that,
that can be seen from space.
Ice flows, that's seen from space and of course, all the weather satellites with
typhoons and tsunamis and, that, those are all satellites providing information.
But what has changed recently and because some forms of satellites have been around
but for 40 years you can look at change over a longer period so you can see where
forests has been cut down or more you know in a shorter type of span you can
look at seasonality so you can actually look at harvests and agriculture and see
how wheat is growing or you can actually see how busy or how cities are growing,
shanty towns things like that all of those things can be picked up quite easily.
It's unbelievable.
So satellite imagery, Earth Observation, yes, you mentioned it, Sean, before,
things like connectivity, communications, that's the other big sort of area.
Where are we now with that?
I mean, from kind of Telstar
Oh right.
Back in the dark ages.
yeah, yeah.
Some of the earliest uses for satellite communications were maritime uses.
So how do you communicate with a vessel once it's gone over the horizon?
Satellites are really the only way of doing that.
So traditionally, there's been a lot of communications for shipping, as
an example, but those at the time required very large antennas or dishes
to be stuck on top of a large boat, so as if you can reduce the size
of the antenna, then you can get it onto a truck or a smaller vehicle.
We're still talking about sort of mobile things there, but...
so you've got new companies entering into the market with...
so it creates competition, so the cost of satellite communications
goes down and so it's not just for emergency services anymore, it can be
used for businesses around the world.
Okay.
So Imagery, Connectivity, and Communications and the other one we
briefly mentioned I wanted to talk about is PNT, Position, Navigation and Timing,
which is not, my mum hasn't heard of that.
So what does...
That is GPS, so that's the, yeah, and the spacey world calls it GNSS, which
is Global Navigation Satellite System.
The timing bit I'm interested in this idea of sort of timing...
Well this takes you back to your physics and your maths.
It's all about the time a signal takes to get from the satellite to the ground.
So there's a clock on all the positioning satellites and you're just working
out how much time passes between you moving from one place to the next
and you triangulate that, so it's...
And this is particularly important for financial services, which we'll
sort of come to in a moment but I just wanted to get a bit of an idea
of like satellites, they're useful.
Yes.
All civilization is now utterly dependent on...
And new ones are being added all the time, that's the point.
It's not static, it's an evolving infrastructure and new scientists will
look at the, you know, light spectrum and say, actually, we haven't got
much on ultraviolet, let's see what happens if we put a sensor up there.
That wouldn't work, by the way, but you know.
Okay, I'm a company, where do you buy data and services from if you're a
company and it's like, okay, I want to tap into this great mine of information
and knowledge and how do I do that?
There's kind of a couple of different routes.
So some of the things that we've, been talking about in this programme
is, you know, what route is kind of best for different types of use cases.
So you've got companies, space suppliers who provide unrefined data.
So it's pretty raw data.
It's like the raw data or the raw images and then that's for, you know, for sale
for a business to do what they want with that and put their own analysis on top of
that, you might also have a space supplier who kind of takes it a step further and
is able to provide more refined data.
So data that's perhaps been archived, it's been processed, it's ready to be
analysed, or it might be overlaid with a different type of data set and then
kind of on the far end, you've got companies who provide more insights.
So, you know, they've already done the analysis, they've already done the
kind of quantitative analysis, they've analysed the data and they can provide,
you know, dashboards, narrative around what the data is saying to help make
those business decisions so that the company can really just take that
on and doesn't have to do any of the analysis specifically themselves.
Okay, so yeah you can sort of, yeah, a suite of different options
depending on what it is that you want to do and presumably if you've got
your own analysts in your company, they can do that or you can buy
that as a separate thing or use it.
That's a very important consideration for companies that want to use remote
sensing or Earth Observation Data.
Do you have the geospatial analysts or the mathematicians that can use that
data, or do you want to buy data that's already been processed and already
has some analytics around it and then just add your value to that data?
What we're finding is that, the large satellite operators that produce data, are
tending to want to work through a market.
So they're companies, off the top of my head, there happens to be
one in Harwell called Giacento.
They can serve up data from a number of different satellite
operators, so that makes it much easier to use, you don't have to
understand how to process the data.
Okay, so satellites are useful, you can buy data in various different
forms depending on your needs.
Perhaps somebody could tell us a little bit about why or how satellite imagery
is contributing to the UK sustainable finance agenda because sustainability
is the other, the big thing that I want to talk a little bit about.
I don't know, sustainability and finance, those two things aren't
often perceived to go together.
We've been speaking to a lot of finance companies, so you know, the banks, the
insurance companies, asset managers and what surprised me was how interested
they are in understanding and supporting the whole Environmental, Social and
Governance, the ESG agenda and sustainable finance, they all see it as, you know,
an important driver for their development in the future and what they need,
what the banks need and the insurance companies is reliable evidence about
what's happening in the environment.
We mentioned earlier about sort of forestry and changes, but they need
to know whether the organisations they're giving loans to are
operating sustainably, you know, are they going to be flooded out?
Or are they going to do something that's going to impact
the environment around them?
This is the double materiality, I think it's that, Joss was telling me about this!
Joss, tell us about, what's it called?
Double...?
Double materiality.
So it's essentially, it's often shown with a very easy diagram of, if you have
kind of two sides to it, one of them is your bank or your private institution
that they're funding or they're investing in and then the environment being on
the other side and you've got an arrow from the bank to the environment and
so that's the kind of outside impact that the bank or what it's financing
is having on the environment and then it's that outside in which is what the
climate is having an effect on the bank or the assets that it's invested in.
So it's the direct release of emissions or then the climatic effects i.
e.
flooding, fires and then the damage that will do and then kind of, you could
take those steps to mitigate, so you can reduce your emissions or your climate
impacts, your environmental damage, your biodiversity damage from one end
and then it's that protecting yourself.
I guess, yeah, mitigating any of those risks, preparing yourself for the effects
that the climate will have on you.
And it is, you know, sustainable finance.
Is that something that's driven by the consumer?
Is it a consumer saying, we want our financial institutions to be much more
sustainable and ecologically aware?
Or are there financial incentives?
I always look at it from actually three different lenses.
One of those is the last one you mentioned, which is your
financial considerations.
So there's that obvious financial risk and losing money over time,
especially with, you know, increase of climate effects, you have supply chain
disruptions, so if you're reliant on selling a certain thing or building a
certain thing and you can't gain as, I mean there's a huge issue with the copper
supply chain at the minute, so if you're building anything involving copper,
you're not going to be able to do that.
Well, there you go.
Well you're not going to be able to build at the scale you maybe want to
because there's disruptions to that supply chain, but there's also that
increasing of your long term value from incorporation of sustainable practices.
It's often seen that those that have more sustainable activities have that
protection of their long term value.
But you can, if you're more sustainable, you can often get
increased access to capital.
So if you're demonstrating commitments to sustainability, you've often
got lower financing costs, or you have more access to funds, and then
you can tap into new markets, so that's the financial considerations.
You've definitely got the reputational drivers, which is those driven by
customers, clients, so a lot of financial institutions have signed up to pledges,
whether that be, you know, the Paris Agreement, one is to keep climate down
and then keep climate warming below two degrees and a lot of customers are now
really interested in that, so if they have a pension fund or they're investing
in something, or they're using a bank for whatever needs they have, then they
want to say that institution is being sustainably conscious, sustainably minded.
Then you have then the kind of third one, which is regulation.
So I think from the discussions that we're having as part of the Unlocking
Space for Business Programme, a lot that's coming from the financial side,
probably, I mean, much more so than the transport and logistics side, is
that need to not only meet regulation themselves and there's a lot of regulatory
bodies and policymakers that are really promoting sustainable finance through
kind of a huge range of initiatives.
Some of the popular ones is CSRD, which is Corporate Sustaining Reporting Directive,
the TCFD, which is the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures.
When you say regulation, are you sort of saying that because
you have to do it because
its...
Because you have to do it, yeah and some of them, I mean, some of them
initially started off as kind of voluntary reporting and they're becoming more
mandatory for bigger organisations.
It might be those that employ over X number of employees, but then also they
have to, for a financial institution, you've got to protect yourself if
somebody that you're investing in is disclosing on anything really,
a lot of that can be climate based.
You need to make sure that they're being honest and that they're, what
they're reporting on is accurate and you can use satellite data
to prove and track a lot of that.
That's a really good point.
I'd like to just build on that point if I can.
Laura, perhaps you could give us some examples of how satellite solutions
can help financial institutions and Joss was sort of alluding to some
there, but maybe you could take us through a few more examples.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's kind of the obvious ones in terms of weather.
So, things around being able to understand the risks from climate changes, the
risk from extreme weather, from natural catastrophes and that sort of plays
into the risk decisions that financial institutions make, particularly for
insurers, for example, as to whether they want to insure certain assets based on the
position and potential impacts of weather, it also kind of covers things like the
resilience monitoring of those assets.
So using satellite imagery to understand what's happened in the past in particular
areas, how potentially assets could be affected by changes in weather,
changes in kind of the environment and the situation around them.
There's all of the emissions monitoring and the kind of the regulatory framework
that lots of institutions have to report into, as Joss mentioned and
then there's also a lot around nature monitoring and biodiversity as well.
So can financial institutions actually use earth observation data to identify
particular changes in the environment.
Again, it comes back to a lot of sort of asset monitoring and insurance, but
you know, there's also the other angle of being able to validate the public
commitments that they've made in terms of their investments and I think it really
just plays back into the disclosures that they have to make and the regulatory
framework that they're operating within.
That's amazing.
So basically if you have access to all that information, you're just kind of
streets ahead of an organisation that doesn't have access to that, I mean,
you know, having this crystal clear window of the world almost in real time.
That's what they would like to get to, as you can tell.
It's a very complex system with a lot of moving parts that all affect each other.
You know, there's carbon offsets, there's supply chain
vulnerability, they're all related.
For example, if, you think that most of the material that gets shifted
around the world, the goods still come in ships and you see what happened
in Suez, with the blocking of Suez and that held up all the microchips.
Somebody needed to know that was going to happen, you couldn't forecast
it, but you know, what has happened?
Where are my goods?
So the bank needs to know that their loans are safe, the insurance company
needs to know where the goods are.
But there's also a climate change aspect to that.
So the Panama, larger vessels aren't able to go through that because the
lakes that feed the Panama Canal are drying up to a certain extent.
It's amazing to be able to see that.
I mean, that's something you probably, this is not common knowledge.
Climate change directly impacting the supply chain and there are many
examples of that all over the place.
But there is a whole thing about scarcity of raw materials
and finding out where those...
Well where stuff is and you know, if you're mining copper for example,
you're digging up huge areas of land...
And not in your own country.
So you've got to know what's happening in China or Africa or South America and
satellite's really the only way that you can actually observe what's happening
in places you can't get to very easily.
I think especially for the raw materials and mining industry that a lot of
these are in, as Sean mentioned, very remote areas and they've
always had historical issues with...
Well it's, and it's getting, it seems to be getting increasingly more and more
political as well as we're searching for rare earth metals in different
places that traditionally we don't mine and that's presumably going to
rely on a lot of satellite information.
Exactly.
If you found that, shall we say there's a rare earth that's needed for batteries
or whatever it is and so your whole economy is going to be reliant on that
and then you notice that a lot of these rare earth deposits are being acquired by
one country, you can then work out that there's probably a policy that they've
got to corner the market in something.
Now, satellites will enable you to see what's going on there,
which you would find it very difficult to do on the ground.
Yeah.
One thing about satellite data in general is it often seems to be a lot more
trustworthy because you can get it in near real time, depending on the source
that you're purchasing this data from.
Global, so you can see a lot of it, it's a lot more over, but it's coming
directly from the source, which is the satellite and the images that you're
given and you know, you could talk about looking forward and deep fakes of
satellite imagery and the use of AI as...
you know, anticipated to become more of a problem, but...
That's another...
That is a whole separate kind of kettle of fish.
But you do, you are just getting these raw unbiased images from remote
areas where traditionally you might have to send somebody out there.
They don't have a whole view or the site may be able to prepare if they know
these people are coming and you know, I don't want to allude that things are
happening, but there's always options that things can get hidden or, you
know, pushed to a side because they know somebody's coming out and you're
then also getting what a viewpoint at that moment in time that somebody
is on site taking that measurement.
So satellites just give you that kind of wider spread, that trustworthy
source, which is so important.
The real power is when you put satellite imagery and data, not just
the imagery, but data coming from the satellites, with other data sources.
So digital terrain models or you know, who owns what building or all the
financial or social aspects of an area.
If you're concerned about ESG and you're concerned about forced
labour, working in minds or something like that, Environmental, Social
and Governance that companies are having to report on nowadays.
But it's layering different types of data from different sources makes the
insights that much greater and makes you help make better decisions, really.
Just going back to the Space for Business initiative, you've given us a really
wonderful kind of overview of just the power and the influence of satellite data.
Laura, what are the barriers to realizing the potential benefits from satellite
derived data, if you're a company, like what's stopping people from...
There's a couple of different barriers and Jocelyn mentioned some
work that we did before we actually set this programme up and that was
to look at what those barriers are.
I think there's barriers both on the end user side, so for businesses, but
also on like the supply side as well.
I think for businesses, there's the awareness piece.
It's understanding exactly what's out there and maybe not knowing that
satellite data could be a potential solution or could be combined
with existing terrestrial data.
I think there's also a big challenge around the persuasiveness of the ROI.
So, you know, there's this idea that perhaps is starting to be challenged
a bit more, which is satellite data is really expensive, really difficult to
understand how you can potentially use it because it's just, it's so inaccessible,
it's so expensive and that kind of plays into the idea that it must be really
inaccessible and really difficult to use or difficult to interpret and I think
that's kind of combined with Challenges on the supply side as well and when we did
this piece of work to understand what the problems were, we recognised that there
were issues around suppliers not quite understanding what the specific issues
were for customers or for end users.
So people who actually want to use satellite data and maybe also there's a
degree of kind of siloing as well, where perhaps products were being sold or in
particular silos, but there could be a wider market for selling satellite data.
So it's kind of a variety of different issues I'd say, all kind of coupled
together and really what we're trying to do is tackle a lot of those issues, so for
both the end users and the supply side.
Okay, we've looked a little bit about sort of financial services and
about how they might, use satellite data and we sort of touched a little
bit on transport and logistics.
I'm just interested thinking about the future and in your opinion,
what's the biggest change that you've seen in satellite data and
services over the past few years?
Like what's been the real kind of game changer?
Well, I'll take that one and it really is this concept of new space, but
space is being commercialised, in that services reflect the needs of the end
users or the companies and the services are being broadened out to be available
to not just the huge companies, but to lots of smaller companies and more
companies along a supply chain, whereas traditionally it was the government or
the military or the science bit that...
Do small companies still think, I mean we talked about this earlier,
do they still think, oh space, I'm too small to bother with this.
They already use space, not necessarily knowing they're using it.
We've already mentioned about GPS.
So GPS or Google Maps or, you know, there are other maps available or
you know, even with their mobile phone, the backhaul, so the bit
that's carrying data might be coming through, satellites as well.
The point being is so they're using it, but they don't
necessarily know they're using it.
What we're trying to say is there is more to it than just what you're
using at the moment and that would be, you know, information about one
of the biggest things for transport and logistics would be, horrible
term, but situational awareness.
So it's knowing where things are, where your assets are, where the
container is, where the ship is.
So it's actually tracking stuff in real time.
Tracking and understanding the condition of those things that, you know, you're
bringing in bananas from around the world and you want to know are they
going to arrive in good condition or not and also, actually related back
to the ESG aspects, how much fuel is being used to bring your bananas in?
Because the company you're supplying is going to be saying,
how much fuel did you use?
You know and you've got to reduce that over the next five years and they've
got to all bring all this information together, it's very difficult.
But it's also going to make businesses much more competitive as well,
the fact that they'll have all this information about things like
fuel and where things are going.
It's like, oh, we could have a much better route perhaps rather than going this way,
we could go that way, which is shorter.
And I think you're going to find new companies springing up that are providing
these additional services, as long as they can do it cost effectively and
particularly if they're using AI, because what we're talking about, satellite data
is huge volumes of it and there aren't enough people to resolve the data issues,
so AI might be able to help there.
The fab thing about AI is obviously the natural, if we've got millions of
images, if you use a naked eye, you're not going to be able to process that
at pace and to the level that you need.
But you also can see things in the data that are impossible to be seen with...
That's really good point!
...the naked eye.
So you're gaining a whole, we're gaining new insights through new types
of sensors and we've got you know, hyperspectral sensors now that show you
a huge range of bands, spectral bands.
But using AI, you're then just increasing the level of insights
you can get into the data.
So the things you can learn and the options that become open to
you as an organisation are huge and forever growing and I think we don't
really know the capabilities yet.
It's really mind blowing just how deep we can look now into data
is, you know, AI is going to...
We've already mentioned about the archive data, you know, these satellites
have been around for decades, some of them, that data is still there.
Most of it has not been looked at by a human being.
So, if you could then go through the archives of all of these thousand
satellites, and then start, you know pulling out information from that using,
let's not call it AI, let's call it an automated non manual process somehow.
Catchy!
But if you can somehow, make use of that archive data that's going
back decades and look at maybe environmental change over every year.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's amazing.
Going back to your original question of what's the kind of greatest changes over
the last few years, I know Sean kind of mentioned this commercial aspect of it
and there's a building on the AI point, it is just that general technological
development and the speed that we've seen over the last few years and if you're
looking at a lot of the satellites that are being launched now, I kind of, I
mean, you can't, see it, but almost 30 centimeters by 30 centimeters in size
and these kind of CubeSats or NanoSats as they call them are so much cheaper to
build, you can build them in a matter of months, whereas a traditional satellite
might take in 10 years and cost you half a billion dollars, you can now do it
for less than a million dollars and...
That is amazing.
...get it up at much less of cost.
So that accessibility is, it's huge and you know, you add on 3D
printing and recreating these tiny satellites, one falls out, one
breaks, just send another one.
Just send up another one or make one in space, make one up there.
Yeah, no, potentially, yeah.
Almost flat pack satellites.
Just finally we should move on and just talk a little bit about what
the UK Space Agency support is.
So we've got all this wonderful stuff that we've been talking about.
So Laura, maybe you could just talk us through a little bit of the, what
kind of support the UK Space Agency offers businesses so they can make use
of some of this amazing technology.
So it's a real variety of different things.
We've been running networking events, first of all, to try and bring together
end user businesses, the supply side and really try and understand
what the potential problems are the businesses are grappling with and
what the potential use cases could be and how they can use satellite data.
We've also been running exploration workshops, so these are trying to
sort of deep dive into the particular challenges that a business is facing,
looking at what those issues might be, how they could use satellite data.
So basically, a business would come to you and say, this is kind of
what we do, how can you help us?
And then somebody from the UK Space Agency could come and say yes, we can
do that, we can do that, we can do that.
Yeah, it's like an exploration of the potential opportunities.
So the different options that are out there.
So we've been working with PWC, working with the Satellite Applications Catapult
and using their expertise to really try and unpick what that particular business
is, struggling with, or, you know, the opportunities that they think they might
want to explore and looking at what those options are for using satellite
data, you know, combined with existing terrestrial data and supporting them
really just to understand the kind of the supplier ecosystem a bit better as well.
And give us, give me an idea of just how well it's doing.
Lots of companies getting involved and coming and has take up been good?
Are you sort of happy with where it's going or do you need
to get the message out more?
I'd like to say we're really happy with what we've found so far and the number
of people we've got involved, we've had some really successful networking events
over the last couple of weeks, but you know, we're always interested in hearing
from new organisations, new businesses who think they might want to understand
a bit more about those opportunities, you know, suppliers who are interested in
understanding how to reach businesses, how to really understand what the kind
of the problems are that they're facing.
So definitely, you know, the programme's got another while to run, up until
next year so really interested in finding out more and hearing
more from different organisations.
So tell me, so if I'm an organisation and I'm listening to this and I'm
thinking, crikey, I want to do this, how would they go about getting involved?
What's the, is there a process that they should know about?
Yeah, so there's a couple of different ways they can get involved.
If it's, if you're an end user business, so if you're an organisation in financial
services or in the transport and logistics sector, we have exploration
workshops, which are available.
We've also just finished a suite of learning and development webinars.
So we're going to have insights available from that as well.
It's all on gov.uk, so via the UK Space Agency.
So there's information there on everything that we've done to date and all of the
initiatives that are coming up, including that learning and development piece,
the exploration workshop sign up form and some really interesting insights
and potential use cases, you know, that we found throughout this whole process.
I presume it must be a big learning curve for you guys as well, you know,
meeting these different organisations and different companies, all of whom have
different aims and goals and aspirations, all slightly different for you
thinking, Oh, I'd never thought of that.
Or this is interesting, why don't we put these guys in touch with these people?
And does that sort of happen?
The exciting thing for me and the Catapult and the agency and PWC is that we're
engaging some sort of major household name organisations that have looked at space
services in the past, but now they're seriously considering what can be done.
You know everyone has a basic knowledge of satellite data to a certain extent,
but actually using it through this programme, they're now considering how
it can actually feed into their business process and that's very important.
It's not just, you know, getting a bit of information and saying, well
that's quite funky, I can now see these, buildings or whatever it is.
But feeding it into what they do on a day to day basis and these
are big companies that are looking at this, so that's important.
That's great!
Yeah, it's been great.
I mean, we've engaged with hundreds of organisations across the programme
and it is really interesting when you get into those deeper conversations,
because you're engaging with different people, sometimes it's the ESG
team, sometimes it's the innovation team, sometimes it's the tech team.
So it's really fascinating when you're seeing those different points of view
and sometimes connecting different parts of the business because they all
have different viewpoints and they all have different priority areas and even
some, and we recently had as part of the panelist, one of our networking events.
She said, I definitely knew we use satellite data, but it's only really
through this programme that I realised how much benefit we can gain and
I, you know, I did, we'd use GPS.
I thought it was all just GPS, but actually the opportunities that are
available for my organisation to make us more efficient, to improve our operations,
to make us more environmentally focused.
Yes, I want to explore this, I want to see the next steps and build on what
was already an existing capability and then you've got the other end of the
spectrum and said, why have you come to us and told us about satellite data?
And they're like, just come on, let's have a workshop.
let's see how it goes and it's great to see people getting really invested
in the space sector and really opening a whole new world to a lot of people
because we know and, you know, the space agency have set up this whole
programme to spread the word of the fantastic space sector that we have in
the UK and there's hundreds of technical specialists, so we need to show them off.
You've hit the nail on the head, our wonderful space sector, we
do have a wonderful space sector.
I mean, it's really, you know, every time I do these podcasts or go to a
space event, I'm always absolutely blown away by just the quality of people
involved in the sector and how good it is and just the immense potential.
The other thing I'm surprised about is how little people know about it from
the outside and maybe that's, we...
I don't know.
I think we need to be working on that because I'm, you know,
initiative like these are terrific.
I mean, this is the way to do it, but it's...
Definitely and it's beholden on the space community to make it easy to use,
you know, it should be, you know, a bit of a no brainer that, yes, we've
got some space data, it goes straight into our business process, we don't
worry about it and also in the future when you've got, you know, sort of
connectivity between satcoms and mobile phones, for example, direct, which will
be in a few years time, not that soon.
I mean, there are a couple of cases where that's being done, but putting, that
power into the hands of, consumers and end users, they will also come up with
their own, things to do with that data that we can't possibly think of and that's
the exciting bit where you've got other organisations saying, well, hang on a
minute, if I had that bit of information, then I can do so many more things and
it's that sort of convening power that the space agency and the other players help.
Great.
Well, listen to Jocelyn, Laura, Sean, thank you so much for chatting.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you.
Fantastic.
Thanks for having us.
Hope you enjoyed that episode.
To hear future episodes of In-Orbit, be sure to subscribe on your favourite
podcast app and to find out a bit more about how space is empowering
industries in between episodes, you can visit the Catapult website, or you
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