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Billionaire Peter Hargreaves' Cash Injection Boosts The UK Space Race

This article is more than 5 years old.

Billionaire Peter Hargreaves' cash injection boosts the UK's space race. This isn't a sentence you'd expect to find the name Peter Hargreaves in. Hargreaves the man who made his name and his billions from the financial services firm Hargreaves Lansdown, which he founded with Stephen Lansdown.

But following the lead of US super-rich Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, Hargreaves has just invested £24 million in the satellite communications facility and space gateway Goonhilly Earth Station, based on the Lizard Peninsula of England's Cornish coast. The funding came about after Goonhilly's chairman Kenn Herskind was put in touch with Hargreaves, explains Ian Jones, Goonhilly's CEO.

"Our Chairman made contact with Peter through a mutual acquaintance," he reveals, "and we prepared a carefully crafted briefing which detailed the amazing developments in the space sector and how Goonhilly addresses these. Peter was interested and followed up with a meeting with me. We discussed these developments further and Peter decided that he liked the idea. Of course, we then went through a substantial due diligence process to verify our business plans."

The additional funds have allowed Goonhilly to drastically upscale its business goals says Jones. "The investment means that we can realise a number of ambitions including: expansion of our Deep Space business to a global network; further development of our Near Space commercial satellite business, especially addressing the new LEO constellation market; investing in a state-of-the-art data centre within the extraordinary existing facilities at Goonhilly and; building up our systems division to include consultant space engineering and manufacturing capability. Peter doesn’t believe in doing things by halves – so we have a plan to expand the workforce and be bold in our ambitions to achieve these goals.

"The funding will mostly be spent on capital projects in the areas I've outlined which will have the best chance of delivering a high return on investment. This will include the build of a number of antennas, a data centre and the purchase of test and manufacturing equipment."

Creating The World's First Private Deep Space Network

Working in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), Goonhilly aims to create the world’s first private deep space network  As part of this plan, Goonhilly's Deep Space business will install new deep space antennas for the launch and these will support commercial lunar and Mars missions from 2020. To complete this Deep Space Network and Goonhilly's LEO constellations and international terrestrial projects, ground stations will be added in the US and Australia.

As part of its partnership with the ESA, Goonhilly will also be involved in return-to-the-moon missions, including the communications with spacecraft on the first Space Launch System. It is also working with Surrey Satellite Technology and the ESA on an innovative private commercial space exploration project called Lunar Pathfinder. This involves taking experimental CubeSats up to the Moon to provide communications and navigation services.

A new R&D and manufacturing facility will also be added to further develop satellite communications and to continue to nurture Goonhilly's partnerships with university research departments. It's currently working with researchers at the University of Oxford, for example, to create a combined radio telescope and deep space antenna using the second largest Goonhilly dish, Goonhilly-3.

If all this goes to plan Goonhilly is set to become a global leader in the space business.

 

 

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