Why space investments are the way to go for investors

Space investments will change our world beyond recognition, UK investors should take note

Space investments and different planets with currencies suspended in air
(Image credit: Getty Images)

In the wake of Jeremy Hunt’s Budget last week a small group of people on one of the UK’s most northerly islands were celebrating. Unst, part of Shetland, is home to the UK’s most northerly cafe, postbox and cake fridge (this is a Shetland thing). It also boasts the advanced construction site that will be the UK’s most northerly spaceport. In his Budget Hunt awarded that port, SaxaVord, £10million. 

More good news came this week when HyImpulse, one of two German firms contracted to launch from SaxaVord, was granted a licence to do so by the UK Civil Aviation Authority (SaxaVord itself was awarded its own spaceport licence last year). HyImpulse should now see its first hybrid rocket, designed to use both liquid and solid propellants (a combination that should make it simple, safe and easy to control), launch later this year. If it works, says HyImpulse’s CEO, it will be a “gamechanger in getting small satellites into orbit”. 

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.