UK Space Biology Symposium

We are living through an unprecedented era of space exploration, marked by NASA’s Artemis Program, ESA’s JUICE mission, and the UK Space Agency’s expanding launch capabilities, alongside the rapid growth of commercial spaceflight that is accelerating access to space and transforming the sector.

Scotland is emerging as a key hub for the UK’s space ambitions, with new spaceports such as SaxaVord in Shetland and Space Hub Sutherland turning it into a full end-to-end ecosystem for space research, development, and launch. These capabilities will not only strengthen existing satellite and data industries but also unlock new national research opportunities. 

However, biological research remains largely underrepresented in this rapid expansion.

Life-science researchers are not yet fully connected to the emerging space community, and as a result, the UK risks missing a major opportunity: to pioneer space-life sciences research that explore how living systems adapt beyond Earth. Integrating life sciences into this expanding ecosystem could place the UK at the forefront of space health, astrobiology, and biotechnology, ensuring that the nation’s new gateways to orbit also become gateways to understanding life itself. 

This event brings together researchers, industry, and space agencies to establish a coordinated and collaborative UK space-biology network, building on -not duplicating- existing strengths across our academic and industrial ecosystems, and focusing on how much more we can achieve by working together. We will not only build connections across the community, but also conduct a focused scoping exercise to identify key challenges, gaps, and opportunities, and develop a strategic action plan to maximise emerging research potential, culminating in a consensus paper by the end.

By leveraging the UK’s world-class life-science expertise together, we aim to strengthen capabilities in spaceflight hardware and life-science integration, positioning UK as a national hub for space-life sciences research.

Yours sincerely, on behalf of the organising committee,

Sofia Ferreira-Gonzalez, IRR Group Leader (University of Edinburgh) and Katherine Baxter, Group Leader (University of Glasgow)

If you have any questions, please email us at sofia.ferreira-gonzalez@ed.ac.uk or Katherine.Baxter@glasgow.ac.uk.