Glasgow: A New Global Space Leader

The space industry is booming globally this century. Should Scotland’s second city bet its prospects on future tech?

As Scotland looks to the future, its most populous city has an ambitious plan for success. Glasgow is working to become a world leader in space aviation and related technologies like data analytics. Success could bring enormous rewards for the city—but there are challenges to consider. So what can a foresight lens tell us about the risks and rewards of Glasgow’s potential futures?

New tools for a new decade

Historically, foresight methodologies have been associated with politics and the military. But over the past few years, the field has captured the attention of the wider business community. At its core, foresight asks questions like:

• What possible futures are on the horizon?

• How likely are these different futures to unfold?

• What practical actions can we take today to help shape tomorrow?

These are essential questions for creating future-ready strategies—whether you’re a corporate, a public sector organisation, a city or a national government. Over the next decade,  I believe we’ll see foresight and other design tools define strategic conversations and play a more significant role in executive decision-making. Foresight offers us useful tools and insights to navigate and shape the future, and across all sectors, a forward-thinking focus has never been more important.

Understanding Glasgow’s space sector

The Scottish space industry is expected to be worth £4 billion by 2030. The sector already contains over 130 organisations and 7,600 employees. Nearly a fifth of all UK space jobs exist in Scotland, and 83 of the UK’s space firms have headquarters here. The city of Glasgow already builds more small satellites than anywhere else in Europe, and Glasgow Prestwick Airport is aiming to become the UK’s first operating commercial spaceport.

The University of Glasgow is another piece of the puzzle. The university leads the world in understanding and processing the information captured from space, mainly through its knowledge base in data science, data analytics and gravitational waves research. Together, these components of Glasgow’s innovation ecosystem have seen the city celebrated internationally as a burgeoning space hub. 

But is the space sector itself a bubble waiting to burst? Fellow Scot Gemma Milne is author of Smoke & Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It, which includes a chapter on space. Gemma believes that some of the more “sci-fi” elements of the industry are indeed overhyped. At the same time, some of the less headline-grabbing aspects are worth a closer look. She says:

“Space tourism and mining are definitely overhyped, but the satellite business is enormous and we don’t really talk about it that much. Whether they’re rocket launchers or data firms, space companies are essentially all focused on the business of satellites. That’s where the money is. The barriers to entry have never been lower, which is why we see so many tiny satellite startups emerging. Yet beyond the incumbents like Inmarsat or Boeing, there’s almost no narrative in the mainstream press about the booming satellite business. Even Elon Musk makes most of his money by putting satellites into space right now.”

Glasgow, then, with its reputation and capabilities firmly focused on satellites, could well be on the path towards a promising future. While American companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin focus on far-future tech, Glasgow’s edge could be in leveraging its past competency in manufacturing and shipbuilding to be known as the “Workshop of the World” once again—or, my favourite, “Workshop of the Galaxy”.

Navigating the future with foresight

If Glasgow continues to build on its space sector success, it has a shot at achieving global industry leadership in the coming years. To examine and fully understand this possible future for the city, we also need to consider the broader forces at play. So what can macro-trends tell us about Glasgow’s prospects?

Cities

Most of the ambitions for the sector are about Scotland as a country, and for an understandable reason: the political chaos of Brexit has reignited the Scottish independence debate. Its supporters are concerned with Scotland’s immediate potential as a nation-state. But in focusing on this, we dismiss a significant macro-trend: The exponential rise of cities.

The signals that cities and residents worldwide are increasingly at odds with the countries enclosing them are on the rise—just 18% of New Yorkers, for example, voted for Donald Trump in the US presidential election of 2016. At the same time, cities are teaming up to create powerful collaborations and pursue collective action on issues such as regulating new industries and responding to the climate crisis. 

These are early signals for anyone paying attention. Cities will become important global actors this century, whether the issue is political governance, sector ecosystems or something else entirely.

Inequality

Glasgow must be careful to find the balance between future tech and social outcomes. Becoming a global space leader offers fresh opportunities for the city as a business hub and international actor, but what about the human impact? 

Glasgow is such an inequality hotspot that its inhabitants are 30% more likely to die early than those in similar deindustrialised cities like Liverpool and Manchester. According to researchers, poor city planning decisions between the 1960s and 1980s paired with a lack of ability to control the decisions affecting their lives were significant contributors to this stat. With those same issues still looming large, can the city’s focus on something as distant as outer space really be justified?

Christopher J Newman, Professor of Space Law and Policy at the University of Northumbria, believes it can. He says: 

“Firstly, space represents an exciting opportunity to establish cities like Glasgow as centres for manufacturing excellence once again. Secondly, by increasing space infrastructure, we increase and democratise that infrastructure: for example, through access to the internet and data-driven services. Thirdly, having space at the core of a city's strategy unites people of all kinds around a shared, forward vision. Space isn’t a luxury, as it’s too often seen. Rather, it’s a vital way of regenerating cities and getting people excited to be part of the larger human journey.”

Social outcomes are too often overlooked in technologists’ and futurists’ visions of the future. Still, space is an arena offering enormous, game-changing returns for cities and a valuable sense of identity for their populations. Whether these returns improve outcomes for Glasgow’s communities, however, depends on ensuring that resilience and equality are prioritised in the city’s plans.

By focusing on Scotland as a nation, the parameters of the conversation are confined to only the next political term or two. Our thinking needs to move beyond this and take broader challenges into account—from the rising prominence of cities to the long-term social and environmental outcomes of today’s decisions. Glasgow’s future as a global space leader looks bright, but we can only make real progress if we consider the human impact alongside politics and economics.

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An insider look at Nile’s futures practice

Our practice director Neil Collman recently ran a Goodbye Faster Horses session on Pragmatic Futurism for Today’s Designers. It was an insider look at how we run our Futures Practice in Nile.

As always, many thanks to Lauren Razavi for research and copyediting support, and Robyn Johnston for her illustrations

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