Britain is considering upgrading its national space centre to a full blown space agency to take the UK to-infinity-and-beyond / where-no-man-has-gone-before / etc.

Currently the country’s British National Space Centre oversees the space science sector, but it operates as a partnership of six government departments, two research councils and two other government bodies. As the Daily Telegraph notes, “critics say the inability of this club sometimes to adopt coherent positions on complex programmes means that UK delegations often find themselves marginalised when they go into international negotiations”.

A new consultation – which launches properly today – will ask whether a single agency would be a better way to go.

“A space agency would provide a lead from people who understand space and its potential,” says John Zarnecki of the Open University’s Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute (in the Herald). “Without a joined-up strategy, we don’t talk with a single British voice and our credibility is weakened at international meetings.”

Science minister Lord Drayson says, “Britain is undergoing a space renaissance. We must build on this to strengthen our outstandingly successful space programme. I hope this consultation will help us establish the infrastructure we need to take UK space into a new age.” (Press release.)

Drayson’s newly created Department for Business, Innovation and Skills claims that Britain has “a hugely successful sector which is second only to the USA in space science”. One suspects Russia and maybe China and the rest of Europe might take issue with that claim.

And Phil Willis, chairman of Parliament’s Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, said in a statement, “We welcome Lord Drayson’s initiative and his desire to revisit this issue in greater detail, but unless significant resources are put into a UK space agency, it will be a space agency in name only.”

Either way, it looks like the UK will be getting a new agency anyway. Drayson has already told the BBC, “I think that an agency is the way to go”.