AMIC
The location for the business services centre is the university’s Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Centre (AMIC) Harbour site, in the west of the city, by George Best Belfast City Airport. AMIC Harbour itself is a £100m advanced manufacturing regional initiative.
With the goal of supporting economic growth, it combines state-of-the-art facilities and an expert engineering team.
The university highlights that AMIC contains engineers experienced in delivering design programmes, materials processing, and digital manufacturing projects for a range of sectors, including aerospace, automotive, and precision engineering.
The announcement of the new SEL took place at a Stormont event to launch World Space Week, earlier this month.
Satellite Applications Catapult
“We are delighted to be launching the new Space Enterprise Lab at Queen’s AMIC – Harbour today to fully connect the Northern Ireland Space cluster to our space ecosystem,” said Dr. Nafeesa Dajda, Director of National Capabilities at Satellite Applications Catapult.
“With this new addition, we now have nationwide coverage, removing barriers to collaboration and ensuring that support for businesses and academia is accessible regardless of where they are based in the UK. The UK’s vibrant space sector is active in every part of the country, and this SEL will encourage collaboration between innovative organisations as they reimagine how we use satellite technology and create new applications to solve our biggest global challenges.”
Northern Ireland Space
As mentioned, it’s the latest addition to the UK’s Satellite Applications Catapult’s network of such Space Enterprise Labs.
For example, earlier this year, the UK Catapult opened a Space Enterprise Lab at Adastral Park.
The idea is for a SEL to provide a range of capabilities or services for local space sector companies. This will enable them to work together more effectively. Part of a national linked network of 14 such facilities, they offer users a “modern, professional and safe working environment”.
The full list of the fourteen UK SEL locations is now:
- SEL Adastral (Ipswich, Suffolk)
- SEL Daresbury (Liverpool City Region)
- SEL Edinburgh (South-East Scotland)
- SEL Glasgow (Central Scotland)
- SEL Harwell (Oxfordshire)
- SEL Leeds (Space Hub Yorkshire)
- SEL Leicester (Leicestershire)
- SEL NETPark (County Durham)
- SEL Newport (South Wales)
- SEL Northern Ireland (Belfast)
- SEL OpTIC (North Wales)
- SEL Spaceport Cornwall (Cornwall)
- SEL Portsmouth (Hampshire)
- SEL Westcott (Buckinghamshire)
Image: Queen’s University Belfast – Pictured (L-R) are: Dr. Nafeesa Dajda, Director of National Capabilities at Satellite Applications Catapult; Mona Jesri, AMIC Head of Sustainable Polymers and Composites; Steven Hunter, AMIC Sustainable Composites Senior Preform Engineer & Operations Manager; Colm Higgins, AMIC Chief Technology Officer; Robert Hill, Northern Ireland Space Cluster Manager and Director of the Northern Ireland Space Office; Professor Roger Woods, Interim Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Engineering and Physical Sciences at Queen’s; Simone Hartless, Head of Cluster Growth at Satellite Applications Catapult; Eoin McFadden, Head of Research & Development at Department for the Economy
