UK and Taiwan forge space partnership
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The memorandum of understanding will see the two universities work together to build opportunities for students to work on live missions and space hardware. Providing practical experience for students will strengthen technical expertise and help tackle the global skills shortage affecting the global space industry.
Wing Ip, Professor at National Central University and Chair of the Taiwan Space Union, said: “The University of Surrey is synonymous with revolutionising small satellites and it’s renowned for the skilled space engineers it trains. With their creation of the new Surrey Space Institute, they are showing their ambition via international cooperation to further build on this legacy, both in space engineering and the wider disciplines now needed to establish a resilient future for the space industry. It is great news that SSI is joining hands with our researchers in Taiwan.”
Professor Adam Amara, Founding Director of Surrey Space Institute at the University of Surrey, said: “Through strong collaboration and practical hands-on research, we have a shared strategic vision for addressing space industry skills gaps both for Taiwan and the UK. Our University and the NCU have a history of successful satellite manufacturing and we have common research interests – for example, in solar radiation – and I’m excited by the prospect of joint working.”
The collaborative plans follow multiple successful engagements between the Universities, from NCU professor Loren Chang joining a Taiwanese delegation to Guildford in March to partnership working between students from each university earlier this summer when Surrey and NCU worked with launch provider Stellar Kinetics at Etlaq Spaceport in Oman. The students worked together to integrate the Jovian-O and SIGHT space payloads that they had developed onto the KEA-1 rocket.
The universities also share research interests. The Surrey Space Centre has built space-based radiation detectors and, as part of the UK’s SWIMMR programme to improve resilience to space weather, developed miniature detectors to measure radiation at different altitudes and created a model for the UK Met Office to predict radiation levels experienced by aircraft.
NCU has developed multiple scientific payloads and small satellite science missions, including the Deep Space Radiation Probe (DSRP), which flew aboard the commercial lunar payload service provider, ispace, Inc.’s Resilience lunar lander, launched in January 2025. DSRP was operational for more than 97% of the five-month mission, providing measurements of the radiation belts, several solar radiation storms and radiation in lunar orbit. It was the first Taiwanese payload to fly and operate beyond Low Earth Orbit.
Established in Taiwan in 1962, the NCU has extensive experience in space science and engineering, with a strong mandate on space science and the geosciences. NCU is also Taiwan’s only university with a Department of Space Science and Engineering with undergraduate and graduate programmes. It is also home to Taiwan’s first interdisciplinary university space centre, the Centre for Astronautical Physics and Engineering (CAPE). NCU currently has robust research and education programs on space weather, satellite communications, small satellite missions, and the space environment.
Surrey has a 45-year legacy of space leadership, particularly through the Surrey Space Centre and its renowned expertise in small satellite technology. This legacy has transformed the economics of space and led to the success of major spinouts, including Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL). The new Surrey Space Institute aims to align the University’s space-related activities across disciplines to address emerging challenges and seize global opportunities in the expanding space economy.
With Taiwan’s rapidly growing Space sector and the Taiwan Space Agency’s ambitious target of growing their space economy to 1 trillion NTD by 2029, the NCU and Surrey are working on ways to support this growth and address potential skills challenges through career professional development and degree programmes.
