Space blog

To celebrate the centenary year of the Department of Electronic Engineering at the University of Surrey from its origin in Battersea Polytechnic to the present day, members of the media are cordially invited to attend an evening with Elon Musk on Friday 5 October. The evening, which will commence at 5pm with a drinks reception followed by talks and a fork buffet, is preceded by a daytime robotic challenge event for teams from local schools.

Elon Musk will be talking about his enterprises into the space industry. He is CEO and CTO of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), which he founded in 2002, who have a 10% stake in SSTL. SpaceX develops launch vehicles and spacecraft for missions to Earth orbit and beyond. Last year, SpaceX won the NASA competition to design, build and demonstrate operation of a commercial replacement for the Space Shuttle, which retires in 2010.

Prior to SpaceX, Mr. Musk co-founded PayPal, the world's leading Internet payment system, and served as the company's chairman and CEO. PayPal currently has over one hundred million customers in 190 countries, processes tens of billion dollars per year and went public on NASDAQ in early 2002. Mr. Musk was the largest shareholder of PayPal until the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in mid 2002.

Elon’s presentation will be preceded by a daytime robotic challenge in which teams of ten pupils from nine local Surrey and Hampshire schools will compete to build a lunar rover robot. The robots will then compete in a number of tasks mimicking the tasks a real lunar rover would be expected to perform. Each school will be able to keep its robot and the school of the team with the winning robot will win £1,000.

For more infomation contact Peter La, Press Office at the University of Surrey, Tel: 01483 689191.

For the first time a team of 10 intrepid sailors from SSTL and its parent Surrey University have banded together to take part in the 28th Ariane's Cup, the Space industries yearly sailing event. The team is formed from all parts of the SSTL group. The race is a chance for employees in the space industries to meet in a friendly social setting and not across the negotiating table.

1 Jon Sedden, The new Skipper
1 Mark Skipper, Still a Skipper but not THE skipper as 1st Mate
3 Paul Brooks
4 Ruediger Weiler
5 Claire Martin
6 Gary Cannon
7 Padraig Quill or Ben Stern
8 Mike Cutter or Andrew Carrel

Note: 7, 8 Part timers!

This year the race is taking place in Portsmouth, for the first time in the UK, from the 20th to the 23rd of September. The Solent will be filled with sails as over 80 boats take part each with a crew of 8 or 10 men. Despite having a healthy 10 man crew over the day period, they are sailing an 8 berth boat to fit the hectic work load of meetings, teleconferences and other inescapable traps of modern "landlovers". In fact, 4 of the crew are taking part for only 2 of the scheduled days. Nevertheless, I think we all agree that it certainly beats 4 days in the rat race!

The 3 day extravaganza begins today (in fact now) with a registration and a visit to the historic dockyard at Port Solent.

The sailing skills range from Commercial Yacht Master to first timer with only a few of the crew having any racing experience so there will have to be a steep learning curve. The aim of the sailing is to learn how to work as a team with the enjoyment more important than the winning, which would be a nice unexpected bonus (though perhaps not for the companies public relations department, as the winning team must host the next year’s event). I expect though that the SSTL’s competitiveness will show itself after the starting gun.

The racing is taking place between Portsmouth and Cowes while the evenings are spent at Gunwharf Quays ‘Tiger Tiger’ and Historic dockyards honing those important socialising skills and relaxing those previously unknown muscles over a pint or two. The SSTL team will be wearing designer gear so keep your eyes open.

Visit the event website

SSTL’s Group Executive Chairman, Sir Martin Sweeting stated in a press release today that he believes the increased competition resulting from the June proposal by the European Commission to fund the Galileo satellite navigation system through the public sector will reduce the cost and risk involved.

”The increased competition will have significant benefits,” stated SSTL’s Group Executive Chairman, Sir Martin Sweeting. “The public sector will soon be in a position to place contracts that give the European taxpayer better value for money and step up the pace of delivering the system”.

SSTL aims to support the European Commission and European Space Agency (ESA) by building on its experience gained through the successful GIOVE-A mission, to provide best value in the operational phase of Galileo. GIOVE-A was developed under a €28M contract signed with ESA in the second half of 2003. The mission’s primary aim was to broadcast Galileo signals from space so that Europe could claim the frequencies filed for Galileo with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The satellite was designed, built, tested and launched before the end of 2005 – on-time and on-budget. GIOVE-A has transmitted Galileo signals for over 18 months and remains the only Galileo spacecraft in operation. Following the success of GIOVE-A, ESA placed a further contract with SSTL in March 2007 for a second satellite named GIOVE-A2.

Sir Martin added:

“It’s clear that a second source of operational satellites is needed, both to provide healthy competition and to reduce risk to the schedule of the Galileo system. SSTL has begun discussions with other key European suppliers, with the aim of forming a team capable of supplying a significant portion of Galileo whilst maintaining the winning formula employed on GIOVE-A. We expect these discussions to be finalised in October, in time to provide the public sector with a much needed competitive option”.

Galileo is a joint initiative between ESA and the European Commission. When fully deployed in the early years of the next decade, it will be the first non-military positioning system to offer global coverage.

Nigeria's newly appointed Minister of Science, Chief Grace Ekpiwhre, began her new role with a visit to UK space company, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL). The Honourable Minister was joined by Professor Robert Boroffice, Director-General, National Space Research and Development Agency, for briefing talks on a two-satellite contract currently under manufacture at SSTL for the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

A new-design SSTL-300 enhanced microsatellite, to be called N2, will boost the country's space capability with a high performance operational mission delivering the latest in high resolution Earth imaging, to join the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) when launched in 2009. The imaging system will include a high-resolution 2.5-metre panchromatic camera with two further multispectral imagers: 5-metre 4-band (20km swath) and medium resolution 22-metre 4-band (300km swath).

Mrs Ekpiwhre also met with 11 Nigerian engineers currently working alongside SSTL engineers on the development of a training satellite. The SSTL-100 satellite, to be called NX, is an integral part of a know-how transfer programme that is providing the Nigerian engineers with hands-on experience in all aspects of spacecraft analysis, build, integration and test. NX will carry a 22-metre multispectral imaging system with ultra-wide 600km swath. The engineers will fully manage the complete life-cycle of the satellite, with responsibility for the delivery of the spacecraft to full flight specification.

The Minister visited both SSTL sites in Guildford, including the manufacturing clean rooms where she saw modules for the N2 spacecraft under construction.

This latest contract is the second between SSTL and Nigeria. NigeriaSat-1 was launched into the DMC in 2003 and continues to provide the country with 32-metre resolution imaging, used by the Government to monitor pollution, manage land use and monitor medium-scale changes to the landscape. N2 will enhance that capability significantly, providing Nigeria with hundreds of valuable geographically referenced images each day, for applications in mapping, water resource management, agricultural land use, population estimation, health hazard monitoring and disaster mitigation and management.