My son is in his second year of an Aeronautical and Aerospace Engineering degree at Glasgow University. It is one of the most demanding study paths you can choose, and he chose it. I am proud of that in a way that is difficult to put into words.
He doesn’t like coming home to Aberdeen much. I don’t really blame him. For a young person in 2026, the comparison between Glasgow and Aberdeen is roughly the distance between Disneyland and a Russian Gulag. That’s not just my description. In 2023, the film Tetris used several Aberdeen locations to represent Cold War Soviet Moscow. The director, Jon S Baird, is from Peterhead, thirty miles up the road. He knows Aberdeen. He looked at it and saw 1980s Russia. When asked why, he said Aberdeen was chosen for its “brutalist, Stalin-esque structures” and called it “the best brutalism in the UK.” [1] The KGB rooftop scene was filmed on the West North Street multi-storey car park. The Soviet computer building was the Zoology department on Tillydrone Avenue, ironically the same building where Baird himself studied. Nobody who lives here found that particularly surprising.
Young people in my son’s generation, the ones doing the hard, serious, technically demanding work of becoming engineers and scientists and builders of things, are fearful and worried in a way that feels different from previous generations. It isn’t just Aberdeen. It’s AI replacing the careers they’re training for, a geopolitical landscape that feels genuinely unstable, a cost of living that makes independence feel like a fantasy, and a lingering post-Covid sense that the world they were promised doesn’t quite exist anymore. They want to be useful. That instinct is still there, strong and real. The problem is that too few places are offering them anything useful to do.
Here’s the thing about an Aeronautical and Aerospace Engineering degree. The core disciplines, fluid dynamics, structural analysis, remote systems, propulsion, materials under extreme stress, are not uniquely space disciplines. They are engineering disciplines. And Aberdeen has been applying versions of all of them, in one of the most hostile environments on earth, for fifty years.
Subsea robotics and space robotics are not different fields. They are the same field in different pressure regimes. Remote operations for offshore platforms and remote operations for orbital systems require the same underlying logic. You are controlling complex machinery in an environment where a human cannot easily intervene, where failure has serious consequences, and where reliability is not optional. The sensor systems, the redundancy design, the data integration, the safety culture, Aberdeen’s offshore industry has been building and refining all of this since before my son was born.
Scotland’s space sector is genuinely thriving. Glasgow is now the largest small satellite manufacturing centre outside of California, anywhere in the world [2]. Edinburgh handles data analytics. Sutherland and Shetland are developing launch facilities [3]. Aberdeen, with its deep engineering workforce and its world-class understanding of remote hostile-environment operations, is almost entirely absent from this supply chain.
My son is studying aerospace engineering in Glasgow because that is where the opportunity currently is. Aberdeen was his home. It is no longer somewhere he can imagine building something.
I’m not going to pretend this is straightforward, or that wanting something to be true makes it so. But Aberdeen is not a city that lacks capability. It lacks direction. Those are different problems with different solutions, and only one of them is actually hopeless.
It is worth being precise about what Aberdeen actually built, because it tends to get undersold even by the people who were part of it. The North Sea oil and gas infrastructure was not simply operated from Aberdeen. It was conceived here, designed here, engineered here, project managed here, and installed here. Every platform, every pipeline, every subsea system, the full complexity of one of the largest and most technically demanding industrial undertakings in human history, was driven from this city. The supply chains that supported each stage of every project, across decades of continuous expansion and innovation, were coordinated from Aberdeen. That is not a support role. That is ownership of the entire endeavour, from first principles to finished installation, in conditions that pushed engineering capability to its limits.
That workforce, and the culture it built, is still here, for now. The question is whether it gets directed toward the next fifty years before it disperses.
Scotland’s space sector needs exactly what Aberdeen already has, and at the same scale of ambition. Not just components and sensors and supply chain fragments, but the full capability: design, engineering, project management, installation, operation. The systems that make space infrastructure reliable, remote operations, structural engineering for extreme environments, redundancy architecture, materials science, safety culture, are North Sea disciplines. They have always been North Sea disciplines. Aberdeen doesn’t need to learn a new industry. It needs to point the one it already has in a new direction.
None of this requires a miracle. It requires someone to decide that it matters, and then to back that decision through the hard, expensive, unglamorous middle section rather than retreating when it gets difficult. Aberdeen has seen what happens when that commitment fails. It has also seen, in its own history, what happens when it holds.
I don’t know if my son will ever come back to Aberdeen, and I want him to go wherever he can build the things he wants to build, wherever that turns out to be. He’s already shown he thinks carefully about that. When he was younger he talked about America. He wouldn’t consider it now, and not just because of the politics, but because of what choosing it would say. That kind of thinking, about what your choices mean and what they stand for, is exactly what Aberdeen needs in the people it’s trying to keep and attract.
He chose one of the hardest degrees available because he wanted to build things that matter. His generation, for all the anxiety and uncertainty they carry, still has that impulse. They want to be useful. They want to contribute to something real. Barack Obama’s message to his final class of White House interns in 2016 was simply this: “Be kind, be useful, be fearless.” [4] I think that instinct is alive in GenZ, stronger than the noise around them sometimes suggests. The problem is not the generation. The problem is the shortage of places willing to give them something genuinely useful to do.
Aberdeen could be one of those places. It has the engineering depth, the technical culture, the infrastructure, and the geography. What it has lacked is the vision to connect what it already has to where the world is going.
My son is building the skills to work in one of the most demanding and exciting fields of the coming century. I would like his home city to still be there when he’s ready, not as a place that reminds a film director of Cold War Moscow, but as somewhere that looked at what it had, decided it was enough to build something new, and got on with it.
That’s not impossible. It’s just a decision.
References
[1] STV News – Tetris: Cold War thriller was shot in Glasgow and Aberdeen by Scottish director Jon S Baird https://news.stv.tv/entertainment/tetris-cold-war-thriller-was-shot-in-glasgow-and-aberdeen-by-scottish-director-jon-s-baird
[2] Scottish Government – Space Sector Manufacturing https://www.gov.scot/policies/manufacturing/space-sector/
[3] FutureScot – Scotland forging leading role in European space economy https://futurescot.com/scotland-forging-leading-role-in-european-space-economy-says-business-minister-at-space-comm-expo-in-glasgow/
[4] Obama’s “Be Kind, Be Useful, Be Fearless” – message to White House interns, 2016 https://www.amazon.com/Fearless-Motivational-American-Politics-Lettered/dp/B07BCGG1HL