The UK Space Agency and its partners the Technology Strategy Board and the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA) are to invest up to £8.5m in collaborative R&D projects to stimulate innovation and growth across the space industry.

This investment forms the core of the space agency’s National Space Technology Programme (NSTP) and aims to help UK industry exploit the growth opportunities identified in the Space Innovation and Growth Strategy.The NSTP is a £10m programme to promote sustainable economic growth. Further elements will be announced in due course. The competition’s scope is in line with the R&D priorities for the UK space industry outlined in the National Space Technology Strategy and its associated technology road maps. It will also encourage the use of the infrastructure and open innovation culture established by the International Space Innovation Centre (ISIC) at Harwell and Guildford.

This is an opportunity for promising UK technologies and applications to be developed to meet their full commercial potential and for business to explore collaborations with other sectors to establish services in new growth markets. This competition will focus on projects that:

• accelerate the development of innovative commercial technologies for space
• lead to new services that exploit data gained from space-based systems
• lead on to identifiable commercial opportunities or will position UK organisations to access other public/private funding where this is required for further development.

It is likely we will award grants of up to £2m to a small number of large ‘flagship’ projects, and grants of between £50k and £100k to around 20 smaller ‘fast-track’ projects. Projects must be collaborative and business-led. They can range from industry-focused basic research aimed at establishing technical feasibility, through to applied research and experimental development (attracting up to 75%, 50% and 25% of total project costs respectively). We do, however, anticipate that most applications will be in the area of applied research (attracting up to 50% funding).

The competition opens on 31 October 2011 and applicants must register by noon on 7 December.Fast-track projects will go through a single-stage application process, while applicants for the flagship projects will go through a two-stage process. A competition briefing will be held in Harwell on 9 November.