Speeches by Bryant.

“I have one tiny point. We need to do more co-ordination with the devolved Administrations in looking at that.”

“Yes, very much so, but I would put it slightly differently. The two key aims are national security and economic growth. This is a very significant part of where Scotland can play a vital role in the wider space sector across the whole of the United Kingdom. We talk about launch, and you think, “Is that just about a roc…”

“It is great to be here. I am a Macleod as well really. My grandmother was a Macleod by birth, and her father was the minister in Avoch. In fact, my grandfather played for Glasgow Rangers. That has probably put off half the Committee, if not all of the Committee—I did not do that research beforehand. I might just set th…”

“Just before Matthew comes in, the one other thing I would say, just in terms of economic growth, is that we know it is projected that satellite demand by 2035 will add up to something like $50 billion. If we only had 2% of that, that is $1 billion coming into the UK economy. Of course, this is an area where we want to …”

“It is not a telecoms question then.”

“I cannot judge whether we have greater appetite for risk than Norway, but it is a very well-made point, which again was made by one of your previous witnesses. They referred to what some people would call a failure as an anomaly. The key issue is whether all the protocols worked, whether there was a threat or danger to…”

“I will defer to Chris in a moment but, to use the analogy that he uses regularly, about the airport, the aeroplane and the passengers, of course Government will need to be a passenger. There will be a series of different things that we need to roll out, and that is part of what we are looking at in terms of our industr…”

“It is going to have to be a mixed economy, so it is not a wholesale switch from one to the other.”

“I am regretting the “space commander” line already, not least because there is a space commander, who will probably have a word with me later. If I could just make one prefatory remark, and then both of my colleagues will probably come in, we also know that we will have to have a sovereign capability. We cannot simply …”

“You make it sound like I want to take over the universe. It is part of the advanced manufacturing sector. A draft report is being produced at the moment. I am not sure quite when DBT will choose to publish all of the industrial strategy. That is in the process at the moment, and space is a key part of it, and should be…”

“It was one of the things we talked about yesterday. Education was not there yesterday, but it is a key thing that we need to make sure of. It is about the pipeline into these skills. I read the evidence session that you had in February. Some of those points were made about Northumbria University, which I visited back i…”

“It is very useful.”

“I know you have previously asked questions about the move to Shetland. It is key not to have just the idea of getting a launch happening this year—or maybe two this year, or one this year and one early next year, or whatever. You need to get to a commercialised situation where you have enough payloads to be able to mak…”

“We at DSIT are arguing for our best-resourced set of outcomes from the spending review. I am conscious that sometimes the UK has an advantage even though it may not have a financial advantage in terms of having as much money to put on the table. As you will again know, sometimes what we are better at doing is managing …”

“Just generally on finance, there is not a lot of it around. We may have lots of ambitions, but we may not be able to meet all of them. We will have to work within the resources that are available to us.”

“Sorry to interrupt, but it speaks to our two key themes of national security and economic growth. For economic growth it is an area where we have a degree of expertise and commitment that others do not necessarily have, and we want to exploit that. Secondly, it is a key aspect of future security, because if you have th…”

“I am not going to take it personally that everybody keeps on saying we need a better Minister for space or whatever. In fact, there are people also clamouring for a Minister for tourism who should be in the Cabinet. Over the years, I have heard these suggestions. Everybody always wants a Minister for this, that and the…”

“We went through pretty rigorous due diligence before putting our £20 million into Orbex. You have already heard from Orbex, so you know the specific niche into which they are seeking to insert themselves. I would say that they are doing so pretty effectively.”

“We did not have the meeting yesterday because we were coming today, by the way. It had been planned for a while.”

“We have had some debris come down on Turks and Caicos, one of our overseas territories. We have had to do that negotiation with them, and that is not necessarily simple.”