Britain will put more than £7.8 billion (about $14.6 billion CAD) behind a new national space strategy built around two goals — defence and national security, and growth of the UK economy — with its single largest funding pot, satellite communications, weighted mostly toward defence.
The UK Space Strategy, published Sept. 8, replaces the country’s 2021 National Space Strategy with funding out to 2029/30, with broader ambitions set to 2035. It backs four subsectors for the government support: satellite communications, space domain awareness (SDA, the tracking of objects and threats in orbit), in-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM, the repair, refuelling and building of spacecraft while they’re already in space), and assured access to space, meaning launch. “Space is not the future – it is the infrastructure of the present,” Defence Secretary Wes Streeting and Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds wrote in the strategy’s foreword.
The funding
Most of the £7.8 billion is spread unevenly across those four subsectors and three others the strategy funds without prioritizing for acceleration — positioning, navigation and timing (PNT); Earth observation; and space science. Satellite communications gets by far the largest share, most of it for defence use.
Subsector Civil funding, 2026/27–2029/30 Notes Satellite Communications £2.8 billion ($5.25 billion) Includes £2.3 billion ($4.31 billion) for the military SKYNET system Space Discovery £1.295 billion ($2.43 billion) UK contributions to ESA science missions and UKRI research Earth Observation £990 million ($1.86 billion) Includes Copernicus membership, ESA programs Space Ecosystem (skills, clusters) £706 million ($1.32 billion) Includes £420 million ($787 million) in Ministry of Defence funding for new technologies Space Domain Awareness £274 million ($514 million) Plus £40 million ($75 million) from a separate manufacturing fund Assured Access to Space (launch) £227 million ($425 million) Mostly ESA launch programs and SaxaVord Spaceport Positioning, Navigation and Timing £76 million ($142 million) A single day without GPS-type signals would cost Britain an estimated £1.4 billion ($2.62 billion) In-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing £117 million ($219 million) Includes a UK debris-removal demonstration mission
A separate £880 million ($1.65 billion CAD) goes to the Ministry of Defence for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and for what the strategy calls a “Control of Space Requirement”, a capability to protect and defend UK and allied interests. SaxaVord, a licensed launch site in Shetland, is meant to anchor Britain’s own access to orbit, backed by £30 million ($56 million CAD) toward getting it fully operational.
Leaning on Europe
The strategy commits Britain to deepen its role in the European Space Agency, NATO and a handful of bilateral partnerships, while still trying to build capability it fully controls itself. That balance has drawn criticism before. RAND Europe, reviewing the UK’s previous, 2021 strategy last year, found Britain had put about three-quarters of its space budget through ESA in 2022 and argued the strategy’s priorities weren’t backed by the kind of concrete, dated milestones South Korea had set for its own program. It’s a critique of the strategy this one replaces. But the same structural bet, collective European capability over a fully sovereign one, carries into the new strategy: ESA funding underwrites everything from the VIGIL space-weather satellite to the European Launcher Challenge, the program backing three rocket companies trying to break Europe’s reliance on a handful of launch providers.
Where Canada fits
Canada is named a handful of times in the strategy — as a partner in the Combined Space Operations initiative and the multinational Operation Olympic Defender, and in a nod to the memorandum of understanding the two countries’ space agencies renewed in April 2024, covering exploration, science and regulatory cooperation. But the overlap with Canada’s own space ambitions runs deeper than any of those mentions suggest.
MDA Space, Canada’s leading space company, has deep roots in the UK. Its UK arm has operated out of Harwell since the mid-2000s, and its UK facility now supplies the digital beamforming technology inside Japan’s next-generation defence communications satellite — work UK Space Minister Liz Lloyd has credited as putting “UK capability at the centre of this.” Closer to home, it also has a foothold inside one of the UK strategy’s four priority subsectors: it partnered with the UK’s Spaceflux in April to supply three Canadian space-surveillance observatories with optical tracking technology, feeding directly into the kind of space domain awareness Britain’s strategy wants more of. “This landmark contract is a direct result of the world-leading, AI-driven orbital intelligence we have built in the UK,” Spaceflux chief executive Marco Rocchetto said when the deal was announced.
Telesat, meanwhile, has applied to Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, for a licence to connect its Lightspeed broadband terminals in the UK — a bid for a piece of the satellite communications subsector Britain is trying to consolidate under one government-wide architecture.
Other Canadian companies have UK footholds of their own. GHGSat, the methane-monitoring company, has run a UK Space Agency-backed emissions-analytics partnership with the Satellite Applications Catapult since 2023, and Kepler Communications has had a UK office and a satellite-development partnership with the Catapult since 2018.
The two countries are also racing similar clocks on launch. Britain wants SaxaVord doing frequent orbital launches by 2030; Canada’s own sovereign-launch push, anchored by a $200-million federal lease at a Spaceport Nova Scotia and the multi-year “Launch the North” challenge program that has so far granted $8.3 million each to three domestic rocket companies, is aiming for an initial Canadian small payload orbital launch by 2028. Isar Aerospace, one of three companies Britain and the rest of Europe just funded through the European Launcher Challenge, is also building a dedicated launch pad at Spaceport Nova Scotia — a direct link between the two efforts. Ottawa’s own Defence Industrial Strategy, published in February, names four sovereign capabilities: space domain awareness, satellite communications, space-based surveillance and space launch. They’re the same four Britain is now prioritizing.
Put the two countries’ budgets side by side and the comparison is worth a look. The UK strategy’s £7.8 billion (about $14.6 billion CAD) is a multi-year total blending civil and defence spending; a narrower, single-year OECD measure of civil space spending does show Canada spending a larger share of its GDP than Britain in 2025. But the OECD’s own report, the Space Economy at a Glance 2026, flags that year as a “steep increase” over 2015-24 for Canada, driven mainly by European Space Agency contributions and lunar-exploration spending, chiefly the Canadarm3 program.
Canada’s own space agency expects its funding to decrease. Its latest departmental plan shows spending falling from $914 million in 2026-27 to $476 million by 2028-29, citing planned pullbacks in Canadarm3 and lunar-exploration funding, alongside broader federal spending reductions, as the main drivers — a reminder that a single-year snapshot can flatter a budget. Having said that, the out years planned spending can change, and sometimes substantially, one way or the other, depending on program changes or additions. Something to keep in mind.
Britain and Canada are, in other words, mid-sized space powers betting on nearly identical lists of priorities, often leaning on the same allies and occasionally on each other’s companies, at the same time. What’s still unclear is whether that turns into closer cooperation between the two governments, or into competition for a slice of a market neither can dominate alone. This is the first story in a new SpaceQ series examining the space strategies of the world’s leading and emerging space nations.