Just outside Oxford is a tech and science hub that is doing business on a cosmic scale. 

One tenant at the Harwell Space Cluster is Oxford Space Systems, a fast-growing space technology firm that develops its own proprietary material to send into space.

CGTN donned protective gear to be allowed inside the company's enormous "clean room" where engineers are fitting out a rig that can test materials worth up to $18 million. 

Keen to protect their intellectual property, some of their work was cordoned off from prying eyes, but we did get a chance to handle a new collapsible antenna for a shoe-box-sized satellite that goes to market next month.

Oxford Space Systems, or OSS, is one of a clutch of UK firms driving growth in the UK space sector. That growth comes from building satellites, ground systems and component parts. The government says space is a great UK success story, but uncertainty over Brexit has been a drag on confidence and investment in the sector.

The UK government is investing heavily into space technology as part of its economic strategy to capture 10 percent of the global market by 2030.

They see it as a sector with potential. It has already tripled in size since 2000 and is worth $18 billion a year to the economy, according to a recent London Economics study called Size and Health of the Space Industry.

The sector contributes $7.1 billion to UK GDP, employs more than 41,000 people and has a 5.1 percent share of the global space economy, according to London Economics.

Brexit blow

But last year, the European Union confirmed the UK would be excluded from some aspects of big European space programs such as the Galileo and Copernicus satellite systems after it leaves the bloc.

"It is hard to argue that Brexit is doing the industry any favors at all," said Mike Lawton, CEO and co-founder of OSS.

"It is going to be really painful for the UK. We have invested 1.5 billion euros in Galileo. Now it is hard to see how we are going to see the full return on that investment currently. Unless we negotiate a better deal, we are not able to use some of the really high-accuracy signals being generated by that program," he said.

But where there is disruption, there are opportunities for niche players such as OSS. Since the UK government can now no longer rely on Europe's satellites for what they want to do in terms of sovereign defense, OSS has kick-started its own initiative to put its own constellation of novel antennas into orbit. And the company has been awarded the biggest ever contract from the Ministry of Defence for a first-time supplier, worth around $1.2 million.

"We have been an unexpected winner of sorts from Brexit," Lawton observed.