Five UK-led European satellite projects will get a bit of public money to help them, while promising to incubate ‘promising’ UK AI startups.
The European Space Agency has a programme called Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems. It seems the Brexit punishment queues at European borders don’t apply to satellite R&D because the UK is a significant contributor to this collective effort. Accordingly, the UK Space Agency is chucking £6.9 million at five UK-led ARTES projects.
£2.9 million of that goes to Orbit Fab for a project designed to refuel electric propulsion satellites while still in orbit. Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall gets £1.6 million for enabling terrestrial communication with the LunaNet specification. £1.19 million goes to Vicinity to develop space 5G, Viasat gets £881,000 for the International Virtual Satellite Operators Network (Phase 2) project, while Archangel Lightworks and Eutelsat hoover up the remaining £356,000 in order to help with the Space Optical Link Integration Study.
