Why Stevenage is the final frontier in space technology Not NASA
You might think Nasa is the only pioneer of space technology, but this £200m satellite (below) is being built not in Houston but at a sleepy industrial estate in Hertfordshire.
By James Delingpole
It’s so tantalisingly close, this strange octagonal aluminium box with its shimmery array of circuitry. I see wires coated in silver, connectors of gold, and parts so delicate that even in this temperature-and humidity-controlled, dust-free environment they have to be protected with pink translucent plastic bags.
In two years’ time, this box - the inside of a satellite - will be blasted four times further out into space than any human has ever been.
That’s why I’m so desperate to touch it. Imagine: to have the tiniest trace of your presence on an object a million miles from earth. It’s an urge almost too powerful to resist. It’s the buzz of the rare, the exotic and the strictly forbidden. Which aren’t qualities you’d most immediately associate with an anonymous industrial estate in Stevenage.
The rocket and fuel tanks of the Lisa Pathfinder satellite, which will be launched in 2011 and pave the way for new scientific experiments on gravitational wave detection and black holes
EADS Astrium is the third biggest space company in the world (after Boeing and Lockheed Martin), and space technology is not something Britain is merely good at; there are some areas where we’re the best. We’re at the forefront of robotics, which is why our autonomous rover, due to take o ff for Mars in 2016, is going to enable us to explore the planet more thoroughly than any mission so far.
And in the field of satellite manufacture, we are peerless. Not only are the models we build more sophisticated than anyone else’s - three are being constructed to measure for the first time the ‘gravitational waves’ predicted by Einstein and we’re even planning to send one to the Sun - but they’re also more reliable, which is why they’re so in demand by the telecommunications industry.
This reliability is something in which Astrium’s highly committed, multinational work force take enormous pride. I discover this after confessing my terrible tactile urge to my guide.
‘I’m really glad you didn’t because they would have torn you to pieces,’ he says. ‘If one tiny bit of grease or dust or hair were to get into some vital part, it could be catastrophic. You can’t repair a satellite up in space. Once it’s broken, that’s it. Millions of pounds down the pan.’
The pathfinder under construction
There are six main types of satellite, classified according to their mission: scientific research, weather, communications, navigation, Earth observation and military. Many of these are made in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, by EADS Astrium. The construction of these satellites is part of a growing space industry, currently worth at least £7 billion a year and supporting 70,000 jobs worldwide, 1,200 at Astrium itself.
‘We live in a world of instancy, and it’s satellites that provide it,’ says Bob Graham, Astrium’s head of engineering. ‘They’re what large City banks use to transfer money quickly and securely; they’ve improved our weather-gathering data in the past decade by 25 per cent; they supply the information for our sat-navs; they’re the reason soldiers in deep valleys in Afghanistan can call for air supplies and air strikes; they’re what give us instant news gathering; they’re used for disaster monitoring; they give us our satellite TV and mobile-phone communication; they’ll soon be providing broadband from space to all those places like India and Africa where there are insu fficient fibre-optic cables.’
A computer-generated image of how the Pathfinder will separate from its rocket
Yet we take them completely for granted.
‘You’ll be watching England play football in Japan in real time with a perfect picture, and suddenly there’ll be a slight jiggle in the picture and you’ll go, “That’s not good,”‘ says Graham.
‘This is how blase we’ve become about satellites. This is how high our expectations have grown of what they can do. It never occurs to us to stop and think about how extraordinary it is that the picture we’re watching was beamed from 22,000 miles away from a satellite by a 6ft reflector, pumping out 100W of radiated power - the equivalent of a light bulb - to a small dish stuck to the side of our house.’
A technician works on the propulsion system
Astrium makes all varieties of satellite with mainly British technology.
‘The digital processors, the mechanisms, the service modules are all ours,’ says Graham. He has worked on and o ff at the company since 1968 when, as Hawker Siddeley Dynamics and later British Aerospace, it used to make Sea Eagle missiles (the British equivalent of the French Exocet). This is the tradition on which Astrium’s technological expertise and esprit de corps are built.
‘There’s a strong company culture here of drive, pride and commitment,’ he says. It needs it too, because when you’re making satellites, anything less than perfection is unforgivable. A client company such as Inmarsat can’t have one of its satellites suddenly denying its customers their live TV streaming or shipping communications: the financial penalties would be enormous; the loss of goodwill disastrous. 
‘A telecommunications satellite has to provide 15 years of perfect operation,’ says Dr Mike Healy, director of Earth Observation, Navigation and Science for Astrium in the UK, as he shows me round one of the rooms where the satellites are tested. ‘It’s quite a challenge.’
The most obvious challenge is that space is a hostile environment. Outside the satellite, temperatures can range from 100 degrees centigrade to -200 degrees centigrade, yet the instruments within must be kept no warmer than 50 degrees centigrade or cooler than -30 degrees centigrade.
Also, unlike on earth where we are protected by our atmosphere, there’s the constant-bombardment of radiation that slowly chips away at the satellite’s capabilities.
The amount of money you could spend defending against this is almost limitless. For example, instead of silicon chips you could use much more costly radiation-hard ones made of gallium arsenide. You could also expend a fortune ensuring that there are dozens of back-ups for every single part. But then, you’d quite likely price yourself out of the market. And satellite manufacture is a cut-throat business.
A carbon-fibre cone and cylinder for a telecommunications satellite
‘Getting the right level of operational e fficiency is a constant trade off between money and risk,’ says Dr Healy. 
‘There are some things which it’s too expensive or impractical to have more than one of, so you have to hope they work.’
This is the satellite-maker’s greatest horror: single-point failure. That’s what it’s called when a component develops a fault that can’t be circumvented by any fail-safe spare part. One of the weakest points on a satellite is its ’solar array drive’ mechanism. Array is the technical term for the giant, wing-like solar panels that power a satellite. (The further away it is from the sun, the larger the panels need to be - sometimes they are 160ft long). These need to revolve once every 24 hours for the life of the satellite, sometimes up to 15 years. If they don’t, it’s mission over.
Whatever their function, most satellites take the same basic form. In the middle are its one, two or four fuel tanks; at the base is its rocket; surrounding it is a box made of either honeycombed aluminium or more expensive carbon composite. Onto this frame is mounted equipment payload equipment for the transponders.
Positional thrusters for satellites ready to be installed - these keep the satellites in the right place for up to 15 years Read more…
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