The £20m Westcott Space Hub has officially opened in Buckinghamshire, providing cutting-edge facilities to help space businesses grow and creating up to 300 jobs.
The Westcott Space Hub, led by URA Thrusters in partnership with Patrizia Hanover Property Unit Trust, Skyports Drone Services, Westcott Shared Facilities Ltd and Buckinghamshire Council, offers state-of-the-art testing facilities, training spaces and commercial workspace for the growing UK space sector.
Located at Westcott Venture Park, a site with over 50 years of heritage as a rocket engine test site, the Hub addresses a critical gap in research and development infrastructure in Buckinghamshire.
Backed by £5.8m from the UK Space Agency, the facility will support collaboration between small and medium-sized enterprises, major industry players, academia and other stakeholders in the local space ecosystem.
Westcott Space Hub boasts world-class facilities
The Westcott Space Hub is one of the few campuses in the world with world-class assembly, integration and testing facilities to hire.
It includes:
- 42,000 square feet of flexible commercial space featuring offices, laboratories and workshops, with 33% already pre-let.
- A 10,000 square foot training facility with a 150-seat lecture auditorium, 15 classrooms and a fully equipped workshop.
- 10,000 square feet of shared facilities, including a clean room, mechanical environmental testing facilities, and propulsion testing facilities, with a vacuum chamber for testing electric propulsion engines – the only facility of its type in the UK and one of the largest in the world.
“The Westcott Space Hub, in conjunction with our historic existing testing sites in Westcott, has made us one of the few companies in the world with capacity for full integration, production and in-vacuum testing for both chemical and electric thrusters,” explained Alberto Garbayo, CEO of URA Thrusters.
Creating hundreds of jobs across the UK space industry
The project, which began in December 2023, has been delivered with £15m in match funding, demonstrating significant private sector confidence in the UK space industry.
The Westcott Space Hub is expected to create approximately 100 direct jobs and 200 roles within the wider supply chain over the coming years.
Space Minister Liz Lloyd commented: “This investment is about more than infrastructure – it’s about creating skilled jobs, attracting private investment, and ensuring that the next generation of space technologies are designed, built and tested right here in the UK.”
The Wescott Space Hub will serve a growing community in the UK
URA Thrusters, which develops sustainable propulsion solutions for spacecraft, has expanded into one of the Hub’s main buildings, enabling other companies to access world-class testing and development facilities without relocating abroad.
Westcott Venture Park is already home to an established and growing community of innovative companies focused on space propulsion, autonomous systems, robotics, and communications, and is home to the National Space Propulsion Test Facility (NSPTF), also funded by the UK Space Agency.
The UK Space Agency’s Space Clusters Infrastructure Fund (SCIF) has awarded more than £45.6m for 13 projects since it launched in 2023.
This funding is complemented by over £43.8m in match funding from the sector, bringing the total to £89.6 million in private/public investment in space research and development infrastructure.
Moreover, SCIF funding awards have bolstered organisations’ ability to attract investment, helping secure venture capital, private equity, and follow-on public funding, and have already catalysed over £50m in additional investment.
