Predicated on the race to be first to the Moon, the space sector of the 20th century was dominated by government and military, and very much a male domain.

Though still in its infancy, the opening of space to the wider commercial sector has brought with it increasing diversity away from the Star Wars geeks of yore. The shift in focus towards what can be achieved with these technologies to improve the everyday lives of people on Earth is bringing with it a new wave of professionals with mission-driven objectives.

Celia Davies is co-founder of Omanos Analytics, a company based in Glasgow that combines space data with information gathered on the ground to monitor the social and environmental impacts of land use changes brought about by events such as industrial development, war, or climate change. Omanos currently works with the UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency, as well as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) involved in legal justice and climate change.

“There are a lot of women who have built themselves a profile in the sector,” Ms Davies said. “It’s been really important for me to have all of these women as peers and mentors and as a source of inspiration, but I wouldn’t want that to cloud the reality which is of course it is still male dominated, as is almost every kind of science and engineering sector in the UK and in most countries.

“I think one of the things that is starting to shift is the recruitment pipeline. Because a lot of Scottish universities have really noticed that the space sector is a place where their graduates can get jobs, they have put more emphasis on tailoring particularly the post-graduate programmes to space sector needs and they have been very active about talking to different companies to get a sense about what they might need from prospective graduates. So certainly we are seeing more young women in the industry, which is great.”

Theresa Condor left her job as a trade financier with Citibank in New York to co-found satellite company Spire Global in 2012. With annual revenues of more than $100 million (£80m), US-headquartered Spire employs more than 160 people at its main satellite manufacturing facility in Glasgow.

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Ms Condor said her previous focus on trade and shipping movements around the world naturally lends itself to the work Spire does in deploying satellites to monitor things such as the weather and marine shipping traffic.

“At Citibank I was doing the transaction banking of stuff that makes the world work,” she explains. “That’s what I liked about that part of banking, and that’s what I like about what we do on the space sector side.”

Yvette Hopkins spent four and a half years as vice president and director of partnerships at Shetland Space Centre, also known as the SaxaVord Spaceport. She is currently a board member at the Scottish International Space Advisory Committee and chair of the board at Glasgow-based Craft Prospect, an AI-enabled space services company spun out from the University of Strathclyde.

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A former intelligence officer with the US Army who retired to her mother’s birthplace in Shetland, Ms Hopkins got involved with SaxaVord in 2018 and remains an enthusiastic supporter of the project. Although she used satellite intelligence during her military career, her knowledge of the space sector was limited at the start.

“There I was, a former colonel in the United States military, and was now asking very basic questions – it was almost like going back to the starting line,” she said.

“It was Scottish women in the space sector who ‘leaned in’ – that’s the term that is fitting. I was the voice of SaxaVord, of a spaceport, and if I didn’t know stuff I would ask people to explain things to me and it was Scottish women who gave me a safe place to ask silly questions.”