Partner: Satellite Applications Catapult

At the birth of the space age in the 1950s, the UK was a major player in the global space industry. The UK was part of building satellites and building launch vehicle capability. However, in the 1970’s the UKs role was reduced after deciding not to further pursue a launch vehicle programme.

Now the UK is experiencing a space renaissance. With new technologies and companies entering the industry. An important factor in encouraging growth in the UK space sectors is Satellite Applications Catapult. Satellite Applications Catapult is a part of a network of organisations that were set up to help boost the UK’s innovation capabilities in nine strategic sectors, for Satellite Applications it’s all about space.

One area within the space sector that is of particular interest to Satellite Applications Catapult is in-space servicing and manufacturing. While we are starting to see some small elements of in-space servicing and manufacturing taking place, the hope for what this could become is a vision of a fully commercialised manufacturing sector taking place in orbit and across the solar system.

In-orbit servicing

In-orbit servicing is the idea that spacecrafts like satellites and ships should be able to have their lives extended by servicing them while they are in orbit. This could mean a simple refuelling or something more serious like repairing damage from space debris.

There are some examples of in-orbit servicing already taking place, one of if not the first example Is the Hubble Telescope. By the time the April 1990 Hubble launch arrived it had cost NASA $2.1 billion and a few months later when it sent back the first images, they were all blurry. NASA were ridiculed and some questioned whether they should keep receiving the government funds they did. To resolve the problem NASA planned a crewed mission to the Hubble Telescope in an attempt at in-orbit servicing.

The mission was months in the making with seven astronauts learning how to use hundreds of tools and going through several mission simulations. The repair mission itself was a complete success, Hubble was repaired and has been sending back clear images that expand our understanding of the universe for three decades.

However, using astronauts for in-orbit servicing is not the most ideal solution and, in many cases, won’t be a solution at all.

“One of the challenges of being an astronaut is you’re basically wearing effectively gloves, then you’re wearing ski gloves over the top. And then when you’re wearing boxing gloves over the top, you’re suspended several 100 miles above the Earth’s surface, you’re probably reasonably hungry, you’re almost certainly tired, you’re wearing the equivalent of a giant adult nappy, you’re outside working for a very long period of time. In a variety of temperatures though your spacesuit is going to do its best to basically provide you with a comfortable environment. It’s not that comfortable. And you’re having to do effectively fundamentally complex tasks with very limited manoeuvrability.”

That is Mike Curtis-Rouse Head of Access to Space for Satellite Applications Catapult explaining the difficulties astronauts face doing spacewalks, especially when trying to complete complex repairs.

Earlier in 2022 the James Webb Telescope was launched, however unlike Hubble which sits 340 miles (547km) above the Earth in its orbit, the James Webb telescope will actually orbit the sun and will be 1 million miles (1.5 million km) away from the Earth. This means there will be no opportunity to ever send astronauts to repair the James Webb Telescope. But the James Webb Telescope has still been designed with some elements that make it suitable for in-orbit servicing, most importantly with a refuelling port. Without the possibility for human intervention in-orbit servicing will rely heavily on robots.

The cost of space

Creating a manufacturing-based space economy is going to require the ability to be in and operate in space to become much cheaper. The introduction of private companies like SpaceX has dramatically brought the cost of launching satellites and other material to space down.

The NASA space shuttle had a launch cost of around $54,500/kg compared to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 which can launch to low Earth orbit at a cost of $2,720/kg that is a reduction in cost of 20 times.

But Mike Curtis-Rouse explains that making in-orbit servicing more frequent is the real way that the cost of access to space will be most significantly reduced.

“If you take the same example of the taxi, if you worked on the basis that the taxi could do 1000 miles at the end of the 1000 miles you have thrown a taxi away, taxi journeys will be prohibitively expensive. In fact, there won’t be a business model for it. The reality is, that’s actually what we do with a spacecraft today, but after two years, five years, 10 years, 15 years, we do throw the spacecraft away because it’s simply we can’t refuel it, repair it or replace damage.”

If satellites lives can be extended and spacecrafts can be reused rather than thrown away after one use than the. Possibility of opening pace up to a functioning manufacturing industry becomes more realistic.

In-orbit manufacturing

In-orbit manufacturing is in its very early stage, although there are a couple of examples of it being done successfully albeit on a small scale.

“There’s a classic example of a specific tool on the space station. They didn’t have it on the space station, it was a six-month lead time to get a launch to get it to the space station. But they had a 3D printer on the space station. So, they 3D printed one from a polymer. And it worked. And it was quite an important thing that they fixed,” says Jeremy Haddall, Head of Robotics at Satellite Applications Catapult.

However, the hope for what in-space manufacturing could become is much more than one 3D printed part. The plan for in-space manufacturing is in two parts, first is stuff manufactured in space to be used in space, much like the 3D printed part made on the space station. The other idea is for things manufactured in space to be brought back to earth for use.

Compared to manufacturing on earth, sending something into orbit to then be made and then brought back to Earth again sounds much more expensive and not worth the effort. However, the physical properties of space make it ideal for certain manufacturing industries.

The microgravity experienced in space is advantageous in the manufacturing of many different products like things that require structured crystal growth like semiconductors or quantum computers, but it would also benefit the growth of human organs.

In 2020 human tissue was printed on the 3D printer on the international space stations. Printing tissue in the hope of making organs has proved near impossible on Earth, the gravity pulls the layers of tissue together and doesn’t allow for complex structures to hold in place, however in the microgravity of space the cell tissue will hold making printing complex organs like hearts possible.

Other properties of space are also beneficial such as the vacuum, which guarantees very few contaminants allowing for the production of very sensitive products like semiconductors in a clean environment. Also, the temperature in space will allow much more control over certain manufacturing processes.

Space is also very rich and abundant in raw materials and as our ability to explore space further improves the ability to extract more raw materials from space will mean we won’t need to extract so many raw materials from Earth.

As Jeremey Hadall says, “I think that economy to be sustainable, we have to use resources that we find in space, I don’t think we can rely on using up Earth resources, sending space, and kind of saying, yeah, we’ll get out of this great space economy, but it’s completely right and reliant on depleting everything on earth, that doesn’t really work.”

Robots in space

A future where in-orbit manufacturing is taking place will mean mostly robots doing the work, after all space is not a very hospitable environment for people. However, space and the complex manufacturing process that will be taking place is not quite the ideal situation for robots.

Jeremy Haddall explains that normally on Earth if something goes wrong with a robot it’s not a big problem but if the same happened in space it would be. “If the robot stops in a car factory, you can just make it safe, open a safety fence, go in, fix it, and come back out again and start the process over again. You haven’t got that ability in space, so the robots are going to have to be able to work pretty autonomously, they’re going to have to be able to solve lots of challenges.”

This situation leaves the robotics field with two options for space working robots of the future. Either they have extremely high levels of autonomy, far more autonomous than any robots that currently exist today as Jeremy Haddall puts it, “To make it super intelligent or pretty much as intelligent and as clever and able to reason as well as a human being that last but is really hard, the reasoning, because a human can look at a problem and kind of work it out and apply some element of common sense to it. We haven’t quite got there with robots, with AI yet. There’s lots of people doing that. But it’s very theoretical, it’s going to take time to prove that it actually works.”

The other option is to accept a lower level of autonomy from the robots and require a much higher degree of human involvement and control, as Jeremy explain “And that is basically you drive every single piece of variation out to every time a robot sees something, it knows what it is, it’s seen it before, understands it, it’s in the placing expects it to be its position, how it expects it to be.”

Less autonomous robots have been used on Earth in somewhat similar circumstances. After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 60 robots being controlled by humans were sent in to clean up the waste.

Even though big progress is being made within the field of robotics and AI, Jeremy Haddall believes that fully autonomous robots are not the way to go, space provides too many unknowns and allowing humans problem solving abilities to be part of the robots decision making is the way to go.

“We may always have that we may not ever be able to fully predict everything. And we may not ever be able to get it to a stage where a robot has what we call true AI, where it’s really autonomous. Where a robot can look at something and go, I completely understand how this big jumble of parts has got to go together. I’ve never seen these parts before. I’ve never seen the finished components.”

The Westcott facility

Satellite Applications Catapult role in the UK space industry is to help private space start-ups in any way they can.

This can mean assisting these companies with building business cases, creating partnerships between different companies as well as helping many other aspects of these start-up’s businesses.

On top of that, Satellite Applications Catapult provides space companies with the infrastructure and technology they need to develop their products. Satellite Applications Catapult is about to launch its new Westcott facility which will include large-scale robotics and other important manufacturing components that start-ups can come and use. The space industry is expensive but by providing the necessary tools Satellite Applications Catapult can lower the barrier to entry for UK start-ups.

One particularly impressive piece of equipment at the Westcott facility is the Metal Fab One. The Metal Fab One is one of the world’s largest 3D printers, it can print parts to around two thirds the size of an average washing machine. SpaceX uses the same machine to print the engines for the Raptor, Super Draco and Merlin rockets.

Mike Curtis-Rouse explains why having this technology is so useful “But the reality is we have exactly the same technology which can build exactly the same rocket engines as any of the other leading companies in the world who are building rocket engines. And that’s what we’ve companies doing right now. We’ve got them using our metal 3D printing capabilities, to build rocket engines, which they’re testing there, and they’re using the advantage of the metal 3D printer to build parts, they simply couldn’t manufacture using any other process.”

The Future

It may seem like a world where many manufacturing industries exist in space is a long way off but both Mike Curtis-Rouse and Jeremy Haddall believe the emergence of these industries are closer than you may think.

The process of in-orbit servicing is already underway, and more satellites will be fitted with the ability to be serviced as they’re launched. Creating an in-orbit manufacturing sector will require further technological development but the start of that industry could be seen within a decade.

According to Mike Curtis-Rouse “I suspect probably within five to six years, we will start to see nascent products enter the earth, economic markets in terms of products which have been made in space or being made in space to use in space. It’s coming fast.”

Jeremy Haddall also believes that this timeline is realistic, “I’d say within a decade, you would see stuff being manufactured with robots being brought back.”

Further into the future in-orbit manufacturing could reach a size that is rivalling what happens on Earth and expands out not just into orbit but also to other planets. Mike Curtis-Rouse predicts this will happen within 50 years, “I think we are talking about a commercial space industry, which probably spans at least earth, probably the moon and possibly, at least one other planet. We’ll be seeing technologies manufactured in space, to use on earth but also those technologies to use on the moon and possibly on Mars as well. And we’re going to be seeing new economies effectively in new sectors, developing.”

And beyond that the sky’s the limit: “A hundred years? My estimate is we’re probably going to be leaving the solar system.”