The Satellite Applications Catapult is at the heart of the satellite services revolution, driving take-up of space technology and applications to shape, and sustain, the world of tomorrow. We’re driven by how our actions help the organisations we work with, both large and small, bring new services to market. By connecting industry and academia we get new research off the ground and into the market more quickly.

We are one of nine Catapults, uniquely established to transform the UK’s capability for innovation in specific areas and to help drive future economic growth. We help organisations make use of, and benefit from, satellite technologies, and bring together multi-disciplinary teams to generate ideas and solutions in an open innovation environment.

Our aim is to support UK industry by accelerating the growth of satellite applications and to contribute to capturing a 10% share of the global space market by 2030. We are achieving this by exploiting the innovation potential in the UK industrial and academic communities, by being a focal point where small and medium enterprises, large industry, and end users can work together with researchers to challenge barriers, explore and develop new ideas, and bring these to commercial reality.

The satellite applications market is now well established, growing fast but not yet mature.  The opportunities in both earth observation (EO) and communications, and the applications they enable, continue to grow with trends accelerating through the pandemic.  Geospatial technologies and data are increasingly underpinning decision-making in both Government and business.  The satellite communications market is already worth more than $100bn/yr and has demonstrated its importance in recent months. There are strong opportunities to capitalise on the UK Government’s OneWeb investment to deliver major UK growth in connectivity and positioning.

Catapult activities and interventions in applications development across geospatial intelligence, ubiquitous connectivity and in our In-Orbit Demonstration programme have supported the UK to benefit from recent trends. The UK now has a strong and globally well-respected satellite applications community.