International services provider Serco recently launched its Space Academy, a training programme in the Middle East covering everything from Earth observation and satellite navigation to the new space economy and innovation.
ESG Mena spoke to Amar Vora, Head of Space for Serco Middle East, to hear more about the program, the space-sustainability connection, the applications of satellite data and the role of regional collaborations in advancing space ambitions.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Amar, tell us about Serco’s strategy for knowledge transfer to Saudi Arabia as it relates to Vision 2030.
Vision 2030 focuses on diversifying the economy and building a knowledge-based economy driven by innovation. The space sector is also a pillar of the Vision 2030 program as one of the key growth areas within Saudi Arabia.
Part of what we bring as an organisation is over 60 years of operational experience in the space sector globally. With the launch of our Space Academy, we are positioning ourselves to bring all of this operational experience, know-how, and knowledge into the Saudi ecosystem to support the growth of the right workforce and talent within Saudi Arabia.
Last year, we launched our graduate space program. We recruited Saudi nationals, and Sarah AlHabba was our first recruit. She just finished university and spent six months in Europe.
We took her to our European office, where we have a lot of operational contracts delivering for the European Space Agency. She built up that operational knowledge by working with industry experts, working alongside the European Space Agency programs, and now she’s returned to
Saudi Arabia with the right knowledge and skills to support our programs in the space sector.
So, our Space Academy is built to ensure that we can share our knowledge, expertise, and operational skills with the local workforce and the local space ecosystem.
What about the involvement of startups in this regard?
Startups are a big part of my strategy to support the growth of the ecosystem. We’ve already worked very closely with numerous space startups in Saudi Arabia, where we support them with the services they deliver to operationalise and mobilise those services into the Saudi ecosystem.
We integrate their ability to develop space technologies or space innovation into our operational services and take them to market, and it’s very important for me to also be able to support the future growth of startups on a personal level.
Under CST, the Communication Space and Technology Commission this year, Saudi Arabia launched an incubation program for space startups.
I participated in the program as a technical advisor and expert in the space domain, selecting startups entering the Saudi space ecosystem.
It’s very important for me to nurture Saudi Arabia’s startup ecosystem because they will play a big part in the innovation drive that Saudi Arabia will see in space going forward.
Tell me more about your regional partnerships.
In space, nothing is possible without partnerships, which is the mantra I follow in Saudi Arabia. It’s important for me to have the right partnerships with government entities, be it the Saudi Space Agency or CST.
CST, in particular, is a government entity responsible for the STEM drive and encouraging the uptake of space careers.
In parallel to that, none of this is possible without encouraging industry to support the transfer of knowledge and skills into the future workforce. It’s also important that I work very closely with industry, be it industry that’s already established in the space sector or industry that has ambitions for growth in the space sector.
It’s important that we form the right partnerships in collaboration with those entities to support them with operationalising and mobilising more space knowledge, bringing in our 60 years of experience, and supporting them with their own ambitions and space growth.
And definitely not forgetting universities, it’s very important that we have the right relationships with universities. In Saudi Arabia, there are already a few universities that are targeting the space program. KAUST is one university with a big drive around space data and driving sustainability applications using satellite data.
We talk about KFUPM in Daman, which has very strong links to Aramco. They’re also developing their aerospace engineering program. In Riyadh, there’s King Saud University and Princess Nourah University.
There are many universities that all have ambitions to grow in space, and it’s important that we collaborate with them on multiple streams.
One is understanding the pipeline of young professionals or talent coming through them to see how we can support that talent in growing in the space sector. Two is how we can also support them in defining their own space programs and ensuring that their academic structure is aligned with what the industry requires from the space sector.
For me, it’s a really multifaceted approach when it comes to partnership. Government, industry, and academia all have to come together to ensure that we are driving space skills and STEM uptake across the Saudi economy.
How are you planning to support the kingdom’s sustainability efforts to fight climate change?
When people think about the space sector, they probably think that it’s the opposite of fighting climate change or the opposite of sustainability. However, not many people realise that space is very important when it comes to understanding our environment, understanding climate change, and developing strategies to fight climate change and make our environment more sustainable.
Space is a very important contributor to understanding air quality metrics. It gives us a good bird’s-eye view of how air quality is across any country globally because we can monitor air quality. Space is also a very important contributor to agriculture. Agriculture, of course, has an impact on the environment. So, we can encourage more sustainable agriculture, such as irrigation management.
Space is also very important to climate change because, through satellite data, we can monitor its evolution. For example, we can see how the sea level has risen over the past decades. We can also use the data to predict how climate change will grow in the future through IPCC scenarios.
Space data has a very important impact on climate change and sustainability. From our perspective at Serco, it’s a key part of our strategy to ensure we have solutions and services supporting sustainability, environmental monitoring, and climate change.
We have delivered services in this domain in Saudi Arabia as well as globally.
But within the Space Academy specifically, we are also developing programs that are focused on these applications, and on how to use space data to benefit them.
We have a lot of experience in this domain when it comes to our operations in Italy, which was again in very close collaboration with the European Space Agency.
So, the Space Academy’s structure on this agenda is such that we will help the consumers or users of the data better understand how they can use the data to support these different services. We hope that they will promote the uptake and it will promote the Saudi Green Initiative, which is very focused on improving people’s quality of life.
Under the Saudi Space Agency, Saudi Arabia also has a big ambition to develop sustainable space programs under Vision 2030, both from a satellite perspective and from the data utilisation perspective.
So it’s a very important part of the Saudi Space Program nationally, and it’s a very important part of how Serco is delivering its services into the marketplace and the ecosystem.
Tell us more about how the Saudi Green Initiative is connected to the space through your academy.
Saudi Green Initiative is very focused on improving citizens’ quality of life, and space data can support understanding key metrics regarding quality of life indicators in the past, currently, and how future strategies are improving that situation.
Again, I go back to the example of air quality. Air quality is a big concern in the Saudi environment. There’s a lot of industry here, and there’s a lot of other more natural components that degrade air quality, such as particulate matter, which comes from sand. Through space data, we can better understand, essentially, what the air quality today is and what strategies need to be implemented to improve our quality tomorrow.
Through the academy, we have built programs to build up solutions and services around space data to better understand these metrics and indicators.
The Saudi Green Initiative has a huge component around vegetation that you see now in Riyadh. There’s a big drive around planting more trees, making more green spaces. King Salman Park is one of the biggest green spaces being built.
Through space data, we can better inform the vegetation management strategies that are being implemented, from looking at vegetation indices of health to understanding irrigation management.
These all better inform the strategies that the Saudi government is implementing to optimise and improve the efficiency of its green growth strategies.
All of these aspects I’m talking about are more from a solution perspective, but our Space Academy delivers training around the data to enable these types of services, and that’s what we intend to deliver when it comes to these applications.