Government Offers £42m to Develop UK LEO Satellite Broadband and Comms Tech

The government’s UK Space Agency has today opened up the third funding round under their 4-year £160m Connectivity in Low Earth Orbit (C-LEO) programme, which is offering £42m to develop new satellite technologies and components to help supply “high-speed internet, communications and data services” around the world.

Regular readers might recall that the first funding around under C-LEO committed £18m to three projects at the start of 2025 (here) – helping to develop new user terminals, active antennas and on-board regenerative processors etc. A second funding round of £30m was then tabled in March 2026 (here).

The latest pot of £42m is once again being offered to UK businesses, universities and research organisations to help “develop new satellite communications technologies“. The projects in this round “must focus” on one or more of five areas: on-board processing, active antennas, optical links, networking and routing, or user terminals.

Each chosen project will be allocated between around £4m to £25m and must include a “compelling element of matched funding” to be eligible under the programme. The latest funding Call opens today and will close at 12:00pm GMT on Monday 7th September 2026. The UK Space Agency aims to notify all applicants of the results of their Stage One proposals by Friday 2nd October 2026.

The National Space Innovation Programme (NSIP) is separately launching a new £20 million funding call to support the development of space technologies across UK industry, universities and research organisations, with projects due to begin in April 2027. Applications for that are welcome across all areas of space technology, with up to 40% of the budget focused on Space Domain Awareness and In-Space Assembly and Manufacturing.

Space Minister, Liz Lloyd, said:

“Space is not just a scientific frontier, it is a strategic one. If we do not build national capabilities at home, we become overly dependent on others for technologies we cannot afford to be without.

That is why today we are announcing £62 million for satellite communications and space innovation, investing in the British businesses and researchers who will make that capability real. This funding will help develop new satellite communications technologies to keep remote communities connected, capture a growing market for on-orbit manufactured products and strengthen our ability to monitor and protect assets in orbit, while supporting the next generation of space innovators turning early-stage ideas into commercial products.

Strengthening domestic capability in these areas, alongside working with international partners, will help ensure the UK remains secure, resilient and a leader on the world stage.”

The government has previously also invested £155m to develop alternative ways of delivering accurate Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) solutions to complement GPS (here) – supporting everything from mobile (4G/5G) signals to in-car Sat Nav – and have also put £6.9m toward better satellite optical links and 5G NTN solutions (here).