The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Michelle Donelan)

We will also associate to the Copernicus programme, a state-of-the art capacity to monitor the Earth, and to its services. The UK’s association to Copernicus comes at a crucial moment, where the Copernicus space infrastructure and its information services will evolve further and our contribution to understanding and acting on environmental and climate change related challenges is more important than ever. Access to this unique Earth observation data will provide early warning of floods and fires and allow the UK’s world-leading sector to bid for contracts worth over hundreds of millions. And the UK will have cost-free access to the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking services, providing important information about objects in space.

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