[2] BNSC operated as a voluntary partnership of ten British government departments and agencies and Research Councils.

The latest version of the UK civil space strategy which defined the goals of BNSC was published in February 2008.

[5] Rather than being a full space agency as maintained by some other countries, BNSC HQ comprised about thirty civil servants on rotation from the partners.

The UK has contributed the SPIRE instrument for the Herschel Space Observatory and detector and cooling system technology for the Planck cosmic microwave background mission.

Recent BNSC activities include the Mosaic small satellite programme, which led to the launch of the TopSat high resolution EO mission and also the Disaster Monitoring Constellation.