British astronaut Tim Peake has formally opened the new £100 million Space Park Leicester.
The European Space Agency astronaut and former International Space Station crew member was guest of honour at a ceremony at the space research, innovation and teaching cluster.
The space park, which it is hoped will boost the regional economy by £750 million a year and create 2,500 jobs, has already welcomed a string of high profile tech companies, including subsidiaries of Rolls-Royce and AST SpaceMobile as well as air quality specialists EarthSense and the government-backed Satellite Applications Catapult.
It has been developed by the University of Leicester in partnership with Leicester City Council and the Leicester and Leicestershire Enterprise Partnership and a central part of its operations will be the use of satellite data to help improve life on earth. A later stage could include a low-cost satellite production line.
The project builds on the university’s 61-year history of space research and its role in establishing the neighbouring National Space Centre, and places Leicester at the forefront of space technology in the UK.
Guests at the opening included 60 Leicester schoolchildren, who were among 160,000 across the UK who engaged with activities hosted from Space Park Leicester in celebration of Mars Day.
Major Peake said: “Leicester has long been a key location for the UK’s space sector, and it is a real privilege to formally open Space Park Leicester just a short distance away from the National Space Centre.
“Every successful space mission call for experts from a wide range of backgrounds to pull together and collaborate to answer bigger questions – and that’s exactly what somewhere like Space Park Leicester helps to provide.
“I’m also excited to see this project highlighting the exciting careers available within the space sector and helping to train, educate and inspire our future generations.”
Major Peake, who travelled to the ISS in 2015, was given a tour of the facilities by Space Park Leicester executive director Professor Richard Ambrosi, and also took part in a series of schools activities.
Prof Ambrosi said: “We are delighted that Space Park Leicester, even before today’s formal opening, has already shown itself to be the ideal launch pad for cutting-edge space science research and enterprise.
“By hosting forward-thinking University researchers and high-end technology businesses under one roof, Space Park Leicester enables accelerated collaboration on some of the biggest questions of our time: not least the climate crisis.
“Space, by its very nature, feels very far away from our everyday lives here on Earth, but the work undertaken here has the potential to transform almost every aspect of society, from healthcare to the technology in our mobile phones.”
Space Park Leicester houses laboratories, workshops and calibration facilities along with high tech projects such as the pioneering double-walled insulator for the Mars Sample Return 2026 NASA-ESA Mission.
It also has one of the UK’s biggest academic clean rooms to assemble and test space equipment.
Other workshops allow researcher to expand work in machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, and engineers have access to a dedicated drone lab.
It also hosts the headquarters of the NERC-affiliated National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO).
