'We feel that private investors, private players are key to the success of the sector for many reasons because they own the technology. We don't own the technology. They have enough experience, they are in a better position to provide the service, all that we need as a government is to enable them, to facilitate how they enter the market and to remove the market barriers.'

'If I were an entrepreneur I would look at the main players and ask, what can I build  on top, based on what is already existing or what will exist? Access to orbit has already been made affordable, so what is the next step that we're going to build and to do within orbit and then with exploration once the infrastructure is there? What are the big markets that will emerge or the big problems that will emerge to which I can bring a solution?'

'If you look at a lot of the larger aerospace companies that really have built their businesses on serving government missions. Their highest priority is achieving mission success; their risk profile is completely different to a company that enters the market looking to address a commercial or non-government customer base, and so companies like ours that are primarily commercial are just able to have a different risk profile, innovate more, take bigger risks with missions and technologies, and even business models.'

There are a lot of programmes out there that would provide funding and research, support for space companies to develop the space technology, but there's a lack of programmes and support to teach ground end users or potential end users; why isn't there a programme out there that goes 'hey agriculture user, have you actually heard about space tech, what space tech can do for you.'

'… it's all well and good me saying to a business – 'hey, you guys should do space, there's loads of money in it'; and they go 'great, OK, what are the opportunities?' and I say, ‘oh, that's a good point’. And I go back to government or some of the big primes and say, ‘what are the opportunities for the SMEs?’ And they say, ‘well, tell us their capabilities’. So I go back: ‘tell us your capabilities’, and the SMEs say ‘for what?’ and so we've gone backwards and forwards quite a bit and so there's quite a bit of work that needs doing, yes from central government but also with SMEs on the ground to try and bridge that gap, to try and help the SMEs understand what are the routes to market, what are the opening opportunities but also to help government and primes identify the capabilities of SMEs so that they know how this could be drawn together.'

'So if you're at the very beginning of the journey get involved with the local cluster, the local group; build knowledge, build contacts and really understand what the industry is about before you start investing money. Building on that I'd say start building relationships and building your knowledge of the funding routes for R&D and grant access. The whole industry has been born out of science projects – very large very expensive science projects – so if you can understand the route into access funding either through the UK into the European Space Agency or other routes, that will that will help get you speaking to the people that hold the money,  but also getting you up to speed with the  information and technologies they're looking for.'

'Without diversity it's like going into a room and having the lights half on. You don't see threats, you don't see solutions. With diversity, both demographic and disciplinary, you get a much fuller picture, which opens your options and opens it for innovation.'

'I think the best sense I could come up with is saying it's for humanity, and the reason I use the word humanity a lot is that I don't think everyone necessarily has to go to space or have access to space, but we have to find strategies to make it accessible and beneficial for everyone, rather than just increasing inequality based on the consequences of access to certain space resources. I think of access as literal access of who will physically go into space; it's also who will benefit from space or who is already benefiting and doesn't know.'

'The space sector is technically really very good but actually we need so many other skills: it's sociologists, economists, definitely business people, business acumen, finance expertise: it's those sorts of things that are really going to unlock the space sector. Alongside that there's how you work with other sectors; so there's the sectors that space touches already through the services it delivers, like connectivity, safer agriculture, transport, and then bringing these other sectors I've talked about, like the energy sector towards things like solar power in space – those are interesting. But more readily there are a bunch of adjacent sectors that can be brought towards space to create the sector that we really need tomorrow, and it's going to be a very different looking sector, very different makeup to what it is today.

So we could bring advanced manufacturing, Robotics, those sorts of skills towards the space sector now that that would really make a difference.'

'Bringing in dancers, bringing in artists, bringing in individuals who have an entirely different background than STEM adds to it in ways we can't even imagine and some of it is simply putting out imagery that allows us to imagine more than we are able to otherwise, so I think it is absolutely important that even the multi-disciplinary curriculum that we have so far goes further, extends out further to the arts, to areas beyond engineering and business and policy and medicine and recognise that to go into space we take everything with us. We take everything, all our baggage goes with us and we need to support that.'

'Imagination is not just a wonderful daydreaming and invention tool and human capability: it's actually a strategic asset.'

'When we think about the Moon and Mars we also need to think about tech transfer and how that technology benefits us every day. And some key areas as we look at some of the first sustainable development goals. Zero hunger – we're looking at space application whether it's freeze-dried technology, Earth observation from satellites helping farmers in Africa increase their crop yield or vertical farming. We're using space technology to solve parts of that sustainable development goal and we can look at water and sustainable energy and so on.'

'Challenges like climate change, like optimisation of use of resources, of energy, and many of these big challenges that we are facing as humanity can only be addressed if we put all of that processing capability, analytics tools and AI leveraging all of the data sets from satellites to good use.'

'One of the biggest problems to go after in my opinion is how do we use all all these new data to combat climate change? We can use a satellite to detect greenhouse gas emissions, to figure out who's polluting and where the polluters are located. We can monitor and track deforestation and detect illegal logging. I think geospatial data is going to play a very important role in protecting our environment and this is just the beginning.'

'The people that build models are not necessarily those that can actually understand the models, and that can be extremely dangerous: if you don't know what you're modelling you might be modelling either just noise or you might actually be introducing a bias into your algorithm.

Additionally, if we do something in good faith, could that be misconstrued and cause harm? If we think of illegal fishing, of course we want to fight illegal fishing - but what are the considerations that we should be having if it's actually smallholder fishing and it's someone's income that that we are attacking? There there's a big risk there to just look at space-based and remote sense information without embedding them into the socioeconomic system from within which that data comes.'

'So some of the things that are really exciting to see that are developing in the space industry is how we're moving to think more holistically about space sustainability and the environment in which we're operating; and so that really moves us away from thinking about a throwaway culture and space to thinking more sustainably about how we can make the best use of satellites in orbit and providing in-orbit servicing to create a foundational platform within space that can help to generate those services that we're relying on in everyday life.'

'This idea of servicing and reusability is a trend that we see. It's not going to stop: SpaceX has demonstrated it, Blue Origin’s demonstrating it, so many others are focused on this. We're focused on it. We see a huge business opportunity in servicing, and that means debris removal, it means refuelling, it means life extension. It's no more a throwaway culture of we launch and we get rid of. Now we launch, we move, we reuse, we service and that's just going to continue.'