In 2021, Sean Sutcliffe from Oxford Space Systems spoke to The Sky at Night about the UK spaceflight industry. Three years later, he looks at how far the technology, and the space sector, has come since then
Back in June 2021, our space equipment company Oxford Space Systems was honoured to feature in the ‘Space Boom Britain’ episode of The Sky at Night and then in BBC Sky at Night Magazine. We had a tremendous reaction from viewers and readers who were fascinated to learn about our business of designing and manufacturing deployable antennas for space. These can fit into as small a space as a 10cm cube for launch, then unfurl into full-sized antennas. They allow satellite mission designers to obtain better performance across radio frequencies, while keeping down the mass and volume at launch. So how have things progressed in the last three years?
First of all, we’ve seen success with our antennas, which we’ve now shipped and deployed. These are now helping connect everything from trucks to cows!
In 2021, we were also developing our wrapped rib antenna, which unfurls from a 750mm diameter out to three metres or more across. This work has continued with a battery of tests to ensure it will survive launch and work in the harsh environment of space. The work has included vibration testing – up to 16G – to simulate launch conditions, as well as deployment testing in a vacuum across a wide temperature range. We test at both a specialist indoor test range in Germany and using a novel drone setup, measuring performance from 500 metres up. We’re now building the flight version, with a launch booked towards the end of the year.
Off-Earth power stations
Alongside our main deployable antenna activities, we have also undertaken preliminary work to look at the feasibility of space-based solar power stations to provide energy here on Earth. The structures required would be huge, around two kilometres across and weighing around 2,000 tonnes, while delivering two gigawatts of power back to Earth via a non-harmful microwave link. While this may seem in the realms of science fiction, the reduction in launch costs and advancements in technologies now make solar power stations in space a potentially cost-effective, reliable, low-carbon solution for the medium term. There are a lot of questions and uncertainties, but now is the time to begin answering them.
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