'Space nerd' MP Mark Garnier on 'sexy' rockets and turning down Jeff Bezos
Mark Garnier, MP for Wyre Forest (Chris Bull / Alamy Stock Photo)
13 min read
Sienna Rodgers talks to Space APPG chair Mark Garnier about his work with Britain’s pioneering spaceport, how rockets are ‘sexy’ and why he hasn’t gone to space yet
Mark Garnier is a self-confessed “space nerd”. The Conservative MP for Wyre Forest is chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Space and holds several space-related roles outside Parliament, including a paid job advising the Shetland Space Centre, also known as SaxaVord Spaceport. Based on the island of Unst, in the northernmost point of Britain, SaxaVord has just become the first licensed vertical launch spaceport in Western Europe.
“I’ve been there twice. It’s really beautiful,” Garnier tells The House. “It’s huge. What’s amazing about it is when you land at Sumburgh airport, which is on the far south, it’s an 80-mile drive and two ferry trips to get to the north of Shetland.”
The spaceport owners, Frank and Debbie Strang, bought the former Royal Air Force base in 2004 and first used it for ecology tours. They changed tack after a report commissioned by the UK Space Agency found that SaxaVord would be the best location for launching rockets to polar and nearly polar Sun-synchronous orbits.
“The average satellite is about the size of a refrigerator and doesn’t look like anything out of Star Trek. It’s not exciting, it’s not sexy – but a rocket is”
“The reason I have a globe in my office is to demonstrate this. If you look at a globe, there’s different types of orbits, so the Earth spins like that,” says Garnier, turning his globe. “If you need to get to 17,600 miles an hour, the simplest way of doing it is to launch from the equator, where you’re already doing 1,000 miles an hour because of the turn of the Earth.”
Launching from the equator is good for speed, but not for going around the poles, he explains. This is why the Shetlands are ideal for polar orbit. “If you’re launching around the poles, you’ve got to scrub that speed off, so you want to be as far north as you can possibly get… It’s rather like the segments of an orange.”
The first ever satellite mission launched from the UK last year failed: a jumbo jet carried a rocket out of Cornwall and released it over the Atlantic Ocean, but the rocket shut down and failed to orbit. There is still much hope for SaxaVord’s vertical rocket launches, however, which should take place this year.
The Civil Aviation Authority described its granting of SaxaVord’s new licence as “an era-defining moment for the UK space sector”. Garnier will try to make another trip to the Shetlands for the first launch and expects VIPs such as the space minister will attend too. If all goes well, the Strangs will be providing the site for up to 30 launches a year for rocket-developing clients such as Rocket Factory Augsburg and Skyrora.
“People see this as being something which is incredibly important to our space industry. And it is – having our own launch capability is very important. But it’s not the be all and end all of space,” says Garnier.
“Potentially, we could do a huge amount of stuff in space and never have our own launch capability. But it doesn’t inspire people. The average satellite is about the size of a refrigerator and doesn’t look like anything out of Star Trek. It’s not exciting, it’s not sexy – but a rocket is.”
The MP seems a little disappointed that satellites inspire less enthusiasm. “Everybody’s got a model of the Saturn V rocket who’s into space, everybody’s got a model of a space shuttle,” he says. “Very few people have models of comms satellites – they’re just not exciting. But they do so much.”
“The thing with space which is slightly peculiar is that everybody uses it the whole time, but nobody knows they’re using it. You’ve got the obvious thing like your iPhone. Your iPhone tells you where the nearest pub is, how to get home and all that stuff. It’s surprising how many people don’t necessarily click that sat-nav means satellite navigation – you’re engaging with satellites.”
The satellites with PNT – position, navigation and timing – systems provide a precision that goes unappreciated. “If you go and buy a sandwich down in the Despatch Box, and put your credit card on it, that’s timed by a satellite. When you transfer money, it’s timed by a satellite. If those satellites all went down, the financial system would collapse, because you wouldn’t be able to time all those systems, and there’s no alternative way of doing it.”
Garnier is similarly keen on Earth observation satellites and their military uses or, as he calls it, “the sneaky-beaky stuff”. He explains: “You can take photographs of the ground, but at night you can’t see anything because there’s not enough light. Satellites can now look at infrared. If you’ve got a Russian column of tanks about to launch an attack in Ukraine, and you know they’re there, if you’re photographing them overnight, when they start the engines up you can see them warming up from space. You know they’re getting active to go off and do something, so you’ve got an alert.”
They can be used by hedge fund managers, too. Although it is trickier now that more people work from home, satellites following a Sun-synchronous orbit – capturing images of the same place at the same time with consistent lighting – can look at the heat activity of a railway station at 8am, for example.
“They can see how many people are going to work. And if that heat goes down a bit, you can see that not so many people are going to work, which indicates that the economy is slowing down because there’s not much demand. The figures will come out in three months’ time or six months’ time, but you can see it’s not so active.”
At this point, I finally ask Garnier: should he have chosen a career as a physics teacher? “Therein lies my problem,” he replies. “Obviously, being a Tory toff, I went to a nice leafy public school in Surrey.” (Charterhouse, one of the most expensive schools in the country.) “I was doing maths, physics and, slightly weirdly, art for A-level. Architecture, it would have helped with that,” he explains. But what he really hoped to do was engineering.
“I got offered a load of places at universities and completely screwed up my A-levels and got two Es and a D. I remember my physics master on my leaving report said, ‘Mark is a lovely boy, he works quite hard, and I wish him the very best of luck in his future as long as it has nothing to do with physics’.”
Why did he screw up his exams? “I was just adolescent and not prioritising stuff properly. Smoking too much and drinking Martini Rosso at £2.79 a bottle, if I remember correctly.” Instead, he became an investment banker – as he puts it, “If you fail your A-Levels, what is there left for you but investment banking?” – and made more money than he would have as an engineer.
Still, his interest in engineering never left him, and now he revels in his love of space through Parliament: “If you go on a select committee, you’re essentially doing an MA course in the subject of the select committee. It’s an amazing thing.”
The globe in Garnier’s office is not the only proof of his nerd credentials. “This is how geeky I really am. You’ll be impressed with this,” he says, handing over a copy of a book titled Space Physics, full of incomprehensible algebra. Does he really understand this stuff? “Not really, no.” And this is what he reads before bed? “It’s what I read before Prime Minister’s Questions,” he laughs.
“I got a call from somebody who knows Jeff Bezos… The first thing that came to mind was, how do you declare a £350,000 freebie on the register of members’ interests?”
Garnier’s has other space-related external roles: he is a non-executive director of Space Solar Group Holdings and chairs the advisory board of the Space Energy Initiative. Both explore space-based solar power, and both are unpaid as the MP is a member of the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee.
The solar farms he is looking into involve satellites 3.5 kilometres wide, weighing 2,000 tonnes, requiring 60 launches and £1.5bn to get into space, Garnier says – but it’s worth the effort because one could generate a whopping two gigawatts of power. “Somebody will get a gigawatt-producing satellite in orbit by 2035. It may not be us – I hope it will be us – but somebody will be doing it, and it will change the landscape of green energy production immeasurably. It’s real ground-breaking stuff.”
Garnier predicts Nimbyism on Earth could be the biggest impediment. “I reckon the most difficult bit is going to be planning permission for the antenna on the ground. It’s big – the antenna is seven kilometres across. You’d almost certainly put it at sea. But I think people will be instinctively fearful of it, in the same way that they’re instinctively fearful of a 3G antenna.”
And is the UK government doing enough to help? “How the government reacts to all this is... It’s not bad, it’s just sometimes, conceptually, some of these things are quite difficult if you’re not used to it. Everybody knows about nuclear power because it’s been around 50 years, but beaming energy from space?
“Actually, the technology of beaming energy has been around since Nikola Tesla... We use it every day when we listen to our colleagues getting beaten up by Nick Robinson on BBC Radio 4,” Garnier chuckles.
Taxpayers may be sceptical about pouring their money into projects with faraway benefits – or even no benefits, with space being so high-risk. How ambitious should Britain be in space? Should we go it alone, work with Europe or partner more along Aukus lines?
“The answer to your question is: it should do everything. At the end of the day, if you go back to the most basic economics, back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations 1776, and you want to increase the productivity of your economy, the space sector is an exemplar of productivity because of the value that you can produce by not many people doing it.”
He continues: “We [the UK government] came up with a space strategy, which was more like a space manifesto. We need to put bones on it. I’ve been lobbying very hard over the last two or three years or so to try to enhance our space credentials by aligning our interest in other areas.” The former investment banker is particularly eager to see the City being put at the centre of a UK space strategy.
“Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, wanted to support the UK film industry, which was pretty lacklustre at the time. So, he introduced a tax break on people saving with the purpose of investing in films. That’s been abused, but you can track a path between that decision by Gordon Brown and the success of the Harry Potter franchise directly. One has led to the other. What I’m trying to do – and I’m getting quite a lot of interest in this in the City – is how do we do a similar type of thing for the space sector in the UK?”
Garnier is not so interested in the country competing with the billionaires on launches, explaining: “I don’t think it’s a bad thing that we’re not getting involved in launch to the same extent that someone like Elon Musk is doing. He’s spending an enormous amount of money. I don’t think we’re particularly losing out. We are benefiting. The UK launch companies are benefiting from that skill and technology and that advancement stepping forward.”
The MP does believe, however, that more international state co-operation is needed. Should there be a space equivalent to COP? “There needs to be more than COP,” Garnier says. “We’ve got to get together and agree on where you put your satellites and how you fly them… It needs agreement from China, from Russia, from America. There’s all sorts of people who don’t talk often enough on the ground who have to talk to each other in space.”
He stresses the dangers: without co-operation, satellites could interfere with each other, and coding the signals to avoid such interference becomes complicated. And it could pose a problem for launching. “If you think Elon Musk is potentially putting up 40,000 satellites for his Starlink network, that’s an awful lot of stuff whizzing around the planet. If you’re trying to launch through that, you have to start thinking quite carefully about making sure that any launch doesn’t come close to these satellites.”
Although Garnier says space exploration is only “a tiny, tiny, tiny part of the space industry”, he would jump at the chance to go to space – surely? “Weirdly, weirdly, weirdly,” he enthuses, “I got a call from somebody who knows Jeff Bezos and, if I’m being totally honest with you, I was slightly taken aback.
“The first thing that came to mind was, how do you declare a £350,000 freebie on the register of members’ interests? I just thought, ‘This is going to be terrible. I can’t put that through. It would be awful.’” But it would be allowed? “There’s ‘allowed’, but it just doesn’t look very good!”
He found the idea of being the first MP in space appealing but was slightly worried about the public reaction. “You know how popular politicians are… Everybody would be sitting there thinking ‘We could blow one up!’, hoping it would fail!” he laughs. His wife Caroline encouraged him to take up the opportunity, but in the end the conversation didn’t go any further.
“You’ve got more chance of being a billionaire on this planet than you have of going to space, but I think that’s going to change. There are some interesting things going on with space tourism. It’s going to develop quite quickly. Once the Artemis programme on the moon really gets underway, people are going to start working it out. It’s all thanks to two people: mainly Elon Musk but also Jeff Bezos, because of what they’re doing with the reusability of rockets,” Garnier says.
“These things have to go through a process of commercialisation in order to get the price down,” he adds. “I made a joke about it being $450,000 to get an MP into space – and hopefully back again! – but in 20 years’ time, it could be $100,000. In 30 years’ time, it could be $20,000.”
If he is right, it may not be long before an MP does go to space – and if that MP were Garnier, we would be making one big space nerd very happy.
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