en.Wedoany.com Reported - UK Space Minister Liz Lloyd announced at London Tech Week that the government will provide over £19 million in funding to support the development of technologies related to in-orbit manufacturing and space security in the UK.
Of this, £10 million will go to Space Forge, based in Cardiff. The company specializes in manufacturing semiconductors in microgravity environments, using weightlessness to reduce material defects, aiming to enhance technological performance in telecommunications, computing, defense, and clean energy. This funding comes from the UK Space Agency's increased contribution to the European Space Agency's General Support Technology Programme (GSTP) and will support the company in designing, building, launching, and recovering a new deployable heat shield system called "Pridwen." Traditional heat shields are often fixed rigid structures or tiles, which are heavy, take up significant space, and are difficult to reuse; Pridwen deploys upon re-entry into the atmosphere, forming a larger protective surface, aiming to make spacecraft lighter, easier to recover, and improve the reliability and frequency of returning payloads to Earth.
Lloyd stated that this investment helps the UK maintain its leading position in the rapidly growing space sector and encourages space companies to attract private funding and create high-skilled jobs. Joshua Western, CEO and co-founder of Space Forge, said that through the previous ForgeStar-1 mission, the company has proven it can create a suitable manufacturing environment for next-generation semiconductor materials in space. With this newly funded mission, Pridwen will be brought to commercial readiness, a key step in safely returning materials to Earth and unlocking the future of space manufacturing.
Additionally, £9.25 million has been injected into the UK Innovation and Science Seed (UKI2S) Space Portfolio, managed by Future Planet Capital, bringing the total portfolio to £22 million. The fund is primarily used to help early-stage, high-potential UK space companies get started and leverage more private investment. To date, the UKI2S Space Portfolio has attracted over £17 million from private investors, with a leverage ratio of public funds to additional private investment of approximately 1:5.9.
This year, the portfolio has completed three new deals, helping UK space companies secure over £10 million in additional private support. Among them, Silicon Microgravity received a £500,000 UKI2S investment and subsequently obtained an additional £4.8 million from private investors to manufacture high-precision sensors. Optera, originally based in Australia, established operations in the UK, received a £300,000 investment, and attracted £2.4 million in additional funding to manufacture space object tracking sensors. Spaceflux, which focuses on tracking orbital satellites and debris, received a £100,000 follow-on investment after an initial £400,000 investment through the Space Portfolio in 2025, and leveraged £7.5 million in private funding. Previous investments from the fund include a £500,000 investment in Messium, which uses satellite data and artificial intelligence to help farmers optimize fertilizer use, ultimately leveraging a total of £2.7 million in private investment.
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