Space West Local Innovators - Rebecca Huffee
Welcome to Space West Local Innovators. To celebrate World Space Week, we have profiled some of the local space innovators in our region.
Through this series we'll learn about the individuals elevating the West of England's space sector to the next level.
This edition, we're shining the spotlight on Rebecca Huffee, Business Development Manager at CGI and a member of the Space West Steering Board. Rebecca previously served as Cluster Manager for Space West, helping to shape and strengthen the region's space ecosystem.
How have you and your organisation contributed to innovation within the space sector?
Whilst I would never lay claim to being an innovator, I feel my strengths lie in facilitating innovation, driving connections, and analysing the space landscape to identify gaps and create the disruption needed for innovation to happen.
I am particularly proud of the work I have done to champion stronger approaches to space security, advocating for changes that can help address the cybersecurity poverty gap, identify systemic challenges within the UK space landscape, and propose practical solutions to gaps in the UK’s capacity to identify, understand and respond to threats.
Was there a guiding vision you had within the space sector landscape that drove you to develop your technology and services into space?
I feel deeply concerned about the UK’s preparedness in addressing the rapidly evolving threat landscape at a societal level. I believe that we need a shift in culture, openly recognising the tactics and techniques that our adversaries are adopting to destabilise and disrupt our way of life. At home, that may mean taking sensible steps such as maintaining emergency supplies and having contingency plans in place. Within the space sector, I believe it means taking collective responsibility for the security and resilience of the systems and services on which we increasingly depend.
For me, one of the biggest barriers is the belief that any one organisation can secure itself in isolation. We cannot. None of us has the full picture, and that fragmented, kaleidoscope view of the threat landscape is exactly what allows our adversaries to test, probe and shape our behaviours without us necessarily seeing the pattern. Every individual weakness, every gap in visibility and every delay in response creates another opportunity for them to learn, adapt and push the boundaries of what we will tolerate.
I genuinely believe that we must establish at pace mechanisms to share and analyse threat information so that we can collapse the time between identification and mitigation and see clearly where our adversaries are operating and developing capability, working collectively to demonstrate our resilience through our trust and collaboration.
For me, this is not simply about improving cyber security. It is about making sure that the UK space sector is collectively harder to disrupt, harder to exploit and better prepared to withstand whatever comes next, this in turn will help us all to grow. I believe that resilience comes from what we are willing to share, how willing we are to trust one another, and whether we are prepared to act collectively rather than individually.
How has the West’s space ecosystem benefitted your efforts?
Through my role at Space West and the establishment of the CySpace programme, I have had the privilege of developing relationships and networks that span government, academia and industry across both the space and cybersecurity sectors across the region. I have developed partnerships, indeed friendships with many individuals who have generously offered their capabilities, knowledge and experience that has informed my thinking and driven me to champion this agenda at a regional and national level. I have benefitted hugely from academics across the region who have developed and continue to develop cutting-edge research in this area.
What does the future hold for your innovation, and what impact do you hope it will have?
Again I don’t consider this to be my innovation, the impact that I would like to see is the establishment of a UK Space ISAC Watch Centre which would provide a nationally separable operational capability to strengthen the resilience of the UK space sector, while contributing to Space ISAC’s global mission and fostering a more secure environment for investment, innovation and growth across UK space companies.