Stars in their eyes

As the Rosetta mission shows, Britain is getting it right in space

IN A clean room at the Airbus Defence & Space (ADS) factory north of London, scientists are working on LISAPathfinder (pictured), a hexagon-shaped satellite due to be launched next year. The aim of the ambitious space mission is to try, for the first time, to find and measure gravitational waves—ripples in space-time predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. If that's possible, earthlings would have further evidence that the theory is true, and they should also, eventually, be able to locate black holes more accurately.

This is the kind of technological achievement that has made Britain a leader in satellite design and construction. This week ADS was celebrating the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The probe, Philae, that landed on the comet, was assembled largely in Germany. But Rosetta itself was, for the most part, constructed in the same clean room where LISA is being built; Mr Byrne himself was one of the designers of Rosetta when the mission was first conceived about 20 years ago. Altogether ten British companies were involved in the Rosetta mission, making up 20% of the contractors used among 14 European countries. Some of the fancy kit on Philae was British, such as the miniature laboratory built at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory near Oxford to a design from the Open University.

This outsized contribution to the Rosetta mission is now typical of Britain's place in the firmament of satellite construction. About one-quarter of the world's commercial communication satellites are built in Britain and 40% of the world's small satellites. Most of those are built by Airbus's Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), the world leader in the field. It has launched 43 satellites since it was started by an academic at Surrey University, Sir Martin Sweeting. The whole space sector directly employs 35,000 people, and the supply-chain accounts for thousands more jobs. London-based Inmarsat is one of the world's largest satellite operators, specialising in mobile telephony. The space sector has a turnover of about ￡11 billion a year.

Things have not always been so rosy. The ADS plant in Stevenage has itself been a graveyard for Britain's ambitions in air and space. Originally owned by De Havilland, an aircraft company, it was here during the 1950s that parts for the Comet, the world's first passenger jet, were made. The Blue Streak missile was also built here. Several fatal crashes, however, ended production of the Comet and, with it, Britain's lead in commercial airliners. Blue Streak was cancelled due to spiralling costs, effectively ending the country's interest in launching rockets.

Silver lining

These were disasters at the time, but in retrospect also rather fortuitous. Britain's space industry was consequently forced to look at small-scale projects and to survive on tight budgets, unlike America's. It also made the British more commercially minded in financing the industry.

The satellite maker SSTL, for example, argues one of its directors, Andrew Bradford, is largely about “changing the economics of space”. It has virtually invented the niche market for less expensive, smaller satellites, selling a lot to developing countries. And it works on science missions like Rosetta. Mr Byrne also argues that ADS has been successful partly because it has a good commercial business, making big satellites for customers like BSkyB, a broadcaster. The innovative technology developed for the government-funded science projects like Rosetta is transferable to business, maximising the return on the intellectual investment. For now, it looks like a stellar formula.