On September 24th twenty Members were hosted on a visit to Surrey
Satellite Technology Ltd, in the Guildford Science Park, by Kuo Wong
assisted by his colleagues Marc Casson and Phil Allen. After checking
in at Tycho House, the company HQ, we were briefed by Kuo on the
history and activities of the organisation.
SSTL was founded by University of Surrey (UoS) PhD
student, Martin Sweeting (now Professor Sir Martin Sweeting OBE FRS
FREng, FRAeS, FIET, Executive Chairman SSTL and director of the Surrey
Space Centre). In 1979 while at the UoS, with a team of two staff and
two students in one room and a simple clean room, he created UoSAT-1,
the first modern 'microsatellite,'(150 lb) which he persuaded the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to launch, as a
secondary piggyback payload, into low Earth orbit. This satellite and
its successors used amateur radio bands to communicate with a ground
station on the UoS campus. During the 1980s Sweeting raised funding to
develop the small-satellite concept further and created a research
group that launched a number of satellites. This led to the formation
of SSTL in 1985, with four employees, and a starting capital of just
£100. SSTL was later spun off from the University and sold to Astrium
EADS in 2009. It is now an autonomous entity in the Airbus group.
From Tycho House and its fully automated and
normally unmanned satellite Operations Centre we moved across the road
to the manufacturing facility, the Kepler Building, with clean rooms,
test facilities and laboratories for satellite assembly and
installation. Divided into three groups we toured the building, the
most impressive part of which was the very large satellite assembly
hall, a giant clean room. We were also shown remarkable images of the
Earth’s surface captured by SSTL’s photographic and radar satellites.
SSTL, pioneers in the use of new satellite
technologies, has been operating for over thirty years and is the
World’s leading small satellite manufacturer with a 40% share of the
global small satellite export market. Low cost and high value are
achieved by utilising commercially available hardware. Currently there
are fourteen satellites being operated from the Operations Centre,
there are seven SSTL satellite constellations - groups of satellites
working together providing, for example, Earth observation,
meteorological, navigation (Galileo) and disaster monitoring services -
deployed and under construction. Eighteen customer space mission
training programmes have been completed, over sixty satellites have
been launched with 500 satellite years in orbit. Two satellites are in
manufacture together with eight payloads. Current projects include
space debris removal systems.
This visit was a real eye-opener. How many people
have heard of this remarkable, commercially successful, advanced
technology company, designing and manufacturing World-leading space
hardware and providing space services from the centre of rural Surrey?
Spread the word!