Britain’s strengths include world-class manufacture of large satellites
Where is the UK’s place in the 21st-century race for space? It is more prominent than perhaps you might imagine. For instance, Britain has leading space industry manufacturers such as Surrey Satellite Technology, EADS Astrium and Glasgow’s Clyde Space, as well as satellite network operator Inmarsat, in London.
And British scientists and engineers based overseas and at home have played key roles in the Mars rover programmes and other important projects such as the Hubble space telescope and Cassini mission to Saturn.
There have been almost two decades of space industry growth, points out Anthony Burn, head of space at the defence and aerospace trade association ADS. He says: “It’s a common misconception based on the Cold War mentality that human spaceflight is where it is at, and that any successful space nation has a human spaceflight programme. Human spaceflight is very expensive and limited in what it can achieve – and it’s not where the excitement is now.”
ADS and the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), which has helped to launch a Catapult innovation centre devoted to satellite manufacturing, believe the space market globally could be worth £400 billion in 20 years’ time and that Britain could take 10% of it. This would represent a fourfold increase from the current level of just over £9 billion.
“It’s ambitious but possible,” says Burn. “In order to make that target we are going to have to up our game even further.”
Tim Just, head of space at the TSB, says: “The bulk of the growth will not necessarily be in building lots of extra satellites – although that will play a part – it will be in how we use the data from the satellites, and satellite-based infrastructure in different parts of the economy. An example is GPS: 10 years ago, it was borderline novelty – today it’s a part of many people’s lives.”
Earth observation, both heads of space agree, has massive potential to offer new services back on terra firma. Just says: “We use meteorological data fairly comprehensively but we’re not using imagery or data derived from it in a significant amount in a commercial sense. And there is also temperature monitoring and how this feeds into climate change, or working out how crops are faring to optimise agricultural techniques.”
Another application might be overlaying images with data on a community’s carbon footprint. “Could this drive some business in carbon trading?” asks Just.
Burn makes a comparison with the way in which civil aviation expanded to develop new services. “Aerospace ended up providing so many more services than people envisaged originally, especially as costs came down,” he says.
The lack of a big government customer along the lines of Nasa in the UK has encouraged British space companies to be entrepreneurial in their outlook. Of particular interest is supplying goods such as satellite technology to emerging nations that have yet to establish their own space industries. “We expect the Bric countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – to have an ever-greater demand for earth observation,” says Burn.
Britain’s strengths include world-class manufacture of large satellites and smaller units too. The aim is to continually reduce cost while increasing capability so that, for example, very small satellites will one day produce the highest-quality images.
Burn says: “At the moment, the cheaper it is, the rougher the image. Moore’s law does apply to a certain extent, although there are limitations in physics. As the optics improve, the hope is that very small satellites will one day be able to produce very strong images.”
The UK also has a strong record in spinning out businesses that have adopted technology first used in space programmes. Manufacturing for space poses certain challenges such as very high degrees of robustness, lightweighting, low levels of maintenance, and packaging constraints that can also produce technology suited to everyday life. The TSB has recently awarded £1.1 million to a cluster of companies in Harwell, Oxfordshire that are taking technology first used in spaceflight and applying it to applications on earth.
Reach for the stars: Satellite manufacturing at EADS Astrium
One of those companies is Oxford Micro Medical, which is run by Professor Phil Prewett with two colleagues. He has developed a cheap, portable breath analyser for the biomedical market that relies on technologies developed for the European Space Agency’s comet-studying Rosetta mission. Prewett says: “The space industry is novel: you have to make technologies that are robust so they withstand launch. You have to make them light, because payload is a key issue. And you have to make things simple because they have a long way to go.”
The Oxford Micro Medical breath analyser is able to detect infection with the Helicobacter pylori bacterium, which can cause ulcers and is also associated with increased risk of stomach cancer. H. pylori is widespread and can go undetected for years. If a patient is found to carry the infection, it can be treated with antibiotics.
The technology is based on a miniature mass spectrometer developed for the space mission, explains Prewett. It takes the form of a card 75-100mm long, 50mm wide and 4mm thick. “It’s a magnetic separator which ionises gases using a plasma ioniser,” he says. It also features a miniaturised vacuum system.
A patient being tested for H. pylori swallows a urea tablet containing the carbon-13 isotope. Prewett says: “If the disease is present then urease in the gut interacts with the urea and within 10 or 15 minutes the patient expels a lot of carbon dioxide. If it’s predominantly carbon-13 then the clinician knows the disease is present.”
The portability of the developed-for-space spectrometer and now the breath analyser is crucial to the company’s plans, meaning the equipment can be introduced to the Indian market where typical, bulky mass spectrometers may be few and far between, or only available in clinics or hospitals. “We believe we can bring this to India essentially by having a highly miniaturised, cheaper device,” says Prewett.
He explains that a colleague was working with the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s space science department when he stumbled upon the miniature mass spectrometer. “Fortunately the facilities council people saw fit to patent it: they recognised the potential. We have a patent which is licensed from them, so we have a measure of protection as well.”
Prewett says he used to be sceptical about spin-offs. “But over the years I’ve seen spin-offs from the space industry and I recognise that as a major advantage of the sector,” he says.
Having secured TSB funding, Oxford Micro Medical is not planning to sit on the technology. Manufacturing in scale is likely to be subcontracted out, and the company is looking to adopt cheaper materials that are easier to machine. “Our company would bring it all together, test it and ship it out,” he says.
“Our ambition is to take the product to the point where it’s ready for commercialisation in the next 12-18 months: we don’t see this as a long drawn-out process before we hit the market.
“We recognise that, while there are a lot of people in India, there’s money for this type of technology elsewhere in the world. We’re certainly interested in penetrating the British and American markets. Regulations are stringent, but we haven’t come across any show-stoppers so far.”