UK Space Agency targets July 2027 award for space-surveillance radar

what happened

The UK Space Agency plans to award a contract worth up to £25 million for the hardware and software of a 1MW-class space-surveillance radar by July 2027, with a separate roughly £5 million contract for construction, site preparation, and installation, per European Spaceflight. UKSA originally planned one combined £30 million contract before splitting it following an industry engagement exercise; the radar would be installed at an undisclosed Southern Hemisphere site, detect objects around 5 centimeters across at 1,000 kilometers, and produce at least 10,000 object tracks a day. Work would begin in August 2027 under an initial three-year contract extendable through March 2032. The procurement's national-security exemption was dropped in August and reinstated in the latest call without explanation, per European Spaceflight.

why it matters

A multi-year, Southern-Hemisphere space-surveillance radar contract is exactly the kind of sovereign space-domain-awareness work UK and allied SST providers bid for, and the back-and-forth on the national-security exemption signals UKSA is still working out how much of this capability it will open to ordinary competitive bidding versus restrict on security grounds.

signal-to-noise

quick facts

Companies

none listed

Category

procurement

Impact

notable

SNR

4 / 5

Event date

2026-10-16

Published

2026-10-17 05:28 UTC