The landmark bipartisan report, Defence Space: through adversity to the stars?, is Parliament’s first in-depth look at the role of outer space capabilities in a military-strategic context. It quotes several times from Policy Exchange’s February paper, UK’s Defence Space Strategy in Context: An Analysis, by Gabriel Elefteriu FRAeS, our Director of Strategy and Space Policy.
In particular, the House of Commons committee report highlights one of Policy Exchange’s main conclusions regarding the “Own-Collaborate-Access” framework that is set to guide the MoD’s space domain procurement:
Gabriel Elefteriu of Policy Exchange noted that “How this OCA framework will be used to drive programme decision-making has the potential to make or break Britain’s prospects of becoming a major space nation in the 21st century” and argued that “the OCA mix should be a matter of wider political and strategic debate, not just internal assessment, given its potential impact on Britain’s national space interests going forward.”
The Committee’s study also focuses on the problem of UK’s lack of a national PNT (Positioning, Navigation and Timing — or, “satnav”) capability, stressing how “Policy Exchange’s paper … described PNT as a ‘missing piece’ in the DSS [Defence Space Strategy]”. Policy Exchange’s track record in advocating for a UK satnav solution stretches back to our July 2019 paper, Space: What do we want from the next Prime Minister?
Read Gabriel Elefteriu’s Defence Space Strategy analysis paper here.
