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Aerospace UK
In the face of challenges, resilience comes not only from high-quality sovereign capabilities but also from excellent relationships with allies and partners. Aerospace UK is built to broaden our expertise and resilience through collaboration with customers and partners as we design and develop architectures and capabilities together.
About Aerospace UK
The Aerospace Corporation UK Ltd provides trusted, impartial leadership and support to the UK space enterprise in all fields and disciplines of research, design, development, acquisition, operations, and programme management.
As a trusted, impartial advisor to government, Aerospace UK has the insight to assess virtually any technical challenge, the expertise to provide comprehensive solutions, and the knowledge to help the UK lead in space innovation, manufacturing, entrepreneurship, regulation, and policy.
The Aerospace Corporation UK Ltd (Aerospace UK), with its registered office in Salford, Manchester, is the wholly owned subsidiary of The Aerospace Corporation. Aerospace UK provides independent technical expertise to assist customers in staying ahead of today’s space threats by catalysing innovative technology, accelerating procurement and delivery models, and increasing resilience.
The unique skills offered by Aerospace UK help customers to maintain an international advantage and deliver a positive impact on UK national security, prosperity, and allied cooperation. Aerospace UK’s core tenant is to assist UK space partners in accelerating sovereign capability to achieve UK national and defence space strategies.
The complexity associated with developing novel and agile capability within the space domain is significant. Aerospace has operated as an independent trusted advisor to the US government, international organisations, and commercial space entities for over 60 years. Aerospace UK provides scalable technical, analytic, programmatic, and enterprise integration skills, as well as space strategy and policy using assured data and models tested against a catalogue of successful integrated space programmes.
Fostering Enterprise Integration
Space underpins virtually every aspect of daily life. It is a cross-government responsibility which requires a fully integrated approach. Aerospace UK’s unique ability to offer expertise across the whole space enterprise enables our customers to more easily realise the value in approaching the complex problems of space from an integrated, whole-enterprise perspective. This approach facilitates coherency, agility, and cost management.
Focus Areas
Strategy and Policy
Aerospace constantly scans the horizon for trends and developments in space and matches datasets to support the formulation of appropriate space strategies for governments and organisations. Space is complex and expensive, so portfolio efficiency is paramount.
Spaceflight and Launch
Spanning all stages of the space lifecycle, from concept to operations, Aerospace’s spaceflight and launch success is the result of decades of experience, a highly skilled technical staff, and specialized tools developed to tackle the challenges of space. Aerospace UK helps customer process their choices more efficiently and enables them to speed up their decision-making.
Space Domain Awareness
Aerospace UK supports government customers by leveraging decades of deep technical expertise in developing a capability to analytically evaluate the tactical, operational, and strategic data, such as the location of other space-based items.
Acquisition Support
Own, collaborate, access decisions are becoming increasingly important as the options open to decisionmakers grow. Developments in New Space provide choices which must be evaluated to understand the trade-offs available. Tools and data built up over 60 years enable us to provide decisionmakers with the support they need to take advantage of these opportunities.
Outpacing the Threat
Space is becoming increasingly congested and contested. Aerospace UK addresses modern challenges by helping those whose task it is to secure space and project power to understand the tools available to achieve operational advantage in the space domain.
Technical Assistance
Resilience includes transforming for the future. To address virtually all technical challenges facing space systems and to bolster the UK’s leadership of space, Aerospace UK draws on significant research and innovation capabilities and technical staff with full depth and breadth of space systems expertise. Throughout our history, our technical role has spanned the entire system lifecycle, including pre-award activities and post-award support.
Space Policy and Strategy
The internationalisation and commercialisation of space make it essential to take an enterprise-wide approach to the complex issues of the modern space environment. Developments in the past decade alone have put pressures on spacefaring nations to adapt and develop at pace. Aerospace policy and strategy teams work with their customers to match this velocity to outpace the threat and enable secure and resilient space environments.
Technical Assistance
Architecture development:
Conceiving, designing, analysing, integrating, and managing the system elements of a broad mission structure, including defining and designing interfaces between the individual system elements and inter-operability across missions
System of systems engineering and integration:
Developing an approach to a mission solution whereby the interacting subsystems and systems contribute to the
mission and the interfaces between the systems can harmoniously interoperate to achieve the desired mission capabilities
System design, development, acquisition, test, mission readiness, and operations:
The formal steps in a system development and acquisition process, applied throughout the mission lifecycle and across all mission segments, resulting in an operational capability satisfying joint user needs
Concept development and prototyping:
Designing new, innovative ways to exploit existing capabilities as well as designing, assembling, and testing state-of-the art prototypes that demonstrate the feasibility of new technologies, capabilities, and techniques
Technology assessments, applications, and transitions:
Evaluating technology opportunities and alternatives, optimising for the application of new technologies,
transitioning newly developed technology to industry, and coaching industry to achieve maximum benefit
Decision support and integration and dissemination of industry best practices:
Providing government customers with deep insight on systems and technical challenges as the government-sponsored identifier, collector, and circulator of process improvements, critical technical and engineering processes, relevant information, and lessons learned shared across the UK space industry
Procurement of Complex Capabilities within Strategic Industrial Frameworks
Aerospace UK provides access to a matrix of space domain expertise, combining independent technical, financial, and supply chain analysis. These experts work with partners to develop future programmes or capabilities, leveraging best ‘industrial’ or allied partnership practise. Aerospace UK provides independent technical evaluation and advisory for UK agency procurements. As the repository of historical data and lessons learned relating to space companies and providers, Aerospace UK can facilitate trade space analyses to deliver national prosperity and bolster the resilience of domestic space industries.