8/16/2015
Satellite stars: the British companies at science's final frontier - Telegraph
Satellite stars: the British companies at science's final frontier
One company helps ordinary people launch their own satellites, another is giving
sailors access to high-speed broadband in far off oceans. Britain's space smarts are
changing the lives of people on the ground, all over the world
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The technology of Essex­based Printech was used in the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite which
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By Rebecca Burn-Callander, Enterprise Editor
2:54PM BST 16 Aug 2015
Comment
Nick Potts is standing outside the Comfort Inn in Palo Alto, California,
wearing a lurid orange polo shirt. “I’m famous for wearing the ugliest
colours,” he says. “I have cerise pink and lime green. They help people spot
me in a crowd.”
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Satellite stars: the British companies at science's final frontier - Telegraph
It’s a strange networking technique but one that attracted the attention of a
new US distributor at the Small Satellite Conference in Utah last week which
could lead to “millions” in new revenue.
He is about to head off to Silicon Valley to meet the head honchos
atLockheed Martin, maker of the Hubble Telescope, and is hoping his
lucky shirt will get him noticed again.
Potts, who describes himself as a “mad scientist”, is one of nine British
entrepreneurs taking part in a trade mission run by UK Trade & Investment
and Innovate UK, the Government­backed innovation agency, targeting the
space industry. The organisations wants the UK’s share of the global space
economy to grow to 10pc by 2030.
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The Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) claims that space is one
of the six premier engineering and technology­led sectors that are
likely to have the biggest positive impact on the UK economy in the
coming decades.
Potts is alongside whizz kids such as Tom Walkinshaw – who has built
Pocket­Qube Shop, where people can build and launch their own small
satellites weighing around a kilo, known as cubesats – and Michele Coletti,
the rocket scientist who founded Mars Space in 2007 to create super­
efficient electronic propulsion systems to launch satellites into space.
They are part of a wave of talent that could secure Britain’s future in
space systems, expected to be worth £40bn a year within 15 years.
“All of these burgeoning firms are at the forefront of the new space race and
have built innovative solutions to some of the sector’s greatest challenges,”
says Tim Just, head of space at Innovate.
On this trip, nine companies are seeking either to raise money, find
customers or create partnerships. They competed with hundreds of rivals in
the UK space industry for a place on the mission, and are being introduced
to venture capitalists as “the cream of UK space enterprise”.
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Among the American VCs being wooed is O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures,
which backed Planet Labs, the San Francisco based start­up that is
working to cover the Earth with tiny satellites for imaging,
humanitarian and environmental applications.
To put the appetite for US space investment into context, Planet Labs has
raised $183m (£117m) to date.
Potts isn’t here to raise investment, he’s here to tell everyone that his 25­
year­old company, Printech Circuit Laboratories, is the go­to company for
any satellite maker who can’t use – or doesn’t want to use – standard parts.
Every circuit is made bespoke with novel manufacturing techniques and
groundbreaking new materials, and the price of a Printech circuit ranges
from £300 to £50,000.
The Essex­based firm works with industry giants such as Airbus on widgets
for its imaging and telecoms satellites, but is also a crucial partner for
universities which launch cubesats into space to gather data on topics
ranging from weather to earthquakes. “We have thousands of circuits flying
right now,” he says.
Most notably, its flexible circuit boards were used in the imaging technology
on the European Space Agency’s $1bn Gaia mission, which last month sent
back a spectacular map of the Milky Way.
New 'life in space' hope after billions of 'habitable planets' found in Milky Way Photo: NASA
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Using Printech’s technology, Gaia’s camera is so powerful “it can detect a
human hair from a distance of a thousand kilometres in the dark,” says
Potts.
The firm’s business model is to do fewer jobs at a higher value, so that it
now generates the same revenue – £3m a year – undertaking 50 jobs a
month as it did with 300 a few years ago.
Mike Lawton is also hoping to seal some lucrative deals. The founder and
chief executive of Oxford Space Systems (OSS) is developing the next
generation of “deployable structures” – objects to fling into space – focusing
on antennas, hinges and other hardware.
A core member of OSS is an origami expert who is devising new ways for
robots to furl and unfurl in space. Lawton says: “If you ask the European
Space Agency how long it takes to go from idea to first flight, they’ll tell you
10 years. We are managing to go from concept to flight in about two and a
half years – that means we’ll be setting a bit of a record in the space
industry,”
OSS is based at the Harwell Space Cluster, the UK’s “space
gateway”,and home to ECSAT, the European Space Agency’s new facility.
In 18 months, the area has grown from 40 to more than 60 space­focused
organisations.
Arralis Technologies’ Mike Gleaves has also had a productive trip, meeting
with Nasa to discuss supplying his ultra­fast radar technology for the US
agency’s upcoming projects.
Not all the companies on the Space Mission are in the hardware game.
Stephen McCabe’s Edinburgh­based Scot Sat provides high­speed
broadband to the shipping industry using satellite technology. Its antenna
technology, which was developed using 3D printed parts, claims to bring
down the cost of broadband, charged at $6 per megabyte by incumbents
such as Inmarsat. Streaming a video on Netflix can eat up to 250MB an
hour.
His invention could hugely improve the lives of workers out at sea.
“Crew retention is a big thing in shipping,” he explains. “If you can give
people internet so they can Skype their families and check Facebook, it has
a huge impact on retention.”
Scot Sat will charge $1,800 a month all­in for always­on broadband, and
McCabe is aiming to secure 10pc of the $2bn market. This is an ambitious
target but the serial entrepreneur is not starting from scratch: he sold his
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previous maritime broadband business NewWave Broadband to Inmarsat in
2012.
The last communication between the plane and the satellite took place at 8.11am (local time)
on 8 March
The Scottish space industry employs more than 5,000 people and has
doubled its turnover in three years. Dundee­based Bright Ascension, which
provides software for satellites, is another Scottish representative on the
space trade mission, along with Walkinshaw’s PocketQube Shop.
The UK punches well above its weight in the global space business,
especially when it comes to nanotechnology, robotics, quantum physics and
machine learning.
It has less than 1pc of the world’s population but accounts for 3.2pc of
global expenditure on research and development and produces 6.4pc of
global journal articles and 15.8pc of the most highly cited articles, according
to the UK Science & Innovation Network.
Brad Petris, vice­president of corporate research and development at
$46bn­turnover giant Lockheed Martin, says: “There’s more innovation
going on in the UK than we can handle. The breadth and depth of
investment in academia and SME [small and medium­sized enterprises]
from the UK Government is some of the best in the world.”
Joyeeta Das’ start­up, Gyana, uses machine learning to bring satellite­
imaging data to the masses. The Oxford graduate has built a neural network
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based on the human brain, which allows artificial intelligence to scan images
of the world and draw conclusions about what it “sees”.
This means it can be asked questions ranging from how many oil wells
there are in Sudan to the number of Richard Geres you could fit in Wembley
Stadium – any question on which there is either imaging or statistical data.
“The important thing about Gyana is that it has integrity,” she says. “If you
ask Google about oil wells in an area, and people don’t want you to know
they are there and haven’t registered them, you won’t find them, but the
image does not lie.”
She has also built a sentiment index to work alongside the satellite search,
which will allow people to find out what residents of an area are feeling,
based on social media data.
“Imagine a politician is giving a talk, and we know there’s a crowd so we see
that it’s happening, and our systems show people are unhappy. You
wouldn’t have to wait for the exit polls to find out which way they would
vote,” she says.
The technology is free to use and a mobile app will launch for consumers
next month. Banks, governments and consultancies are testing the service,
Das claims, and will pay for analytics services if their trials are successful.
Das, 30, who is on her third start­up, is seeking $1.5m in funding on this trip
to build out the software and is also in talks with some of the world’s largest
satellite imaging providers, such as Nasa, to access their data for free.
“I want to put hi­tech technology in the hands of the consumer,” says Das.
Bird.i founder Chris Brunskill wants to help everyday people access satellite
images owned by governments or corporations through a single platform.
“Imagine taking a real­time selfie from space,” he says. “Or checking that
the hotel you’ve booked for your holiday doesn’t have a building site next
door.”
The start­up is seeking $1m in seed capital. “It’s not difficult to buy satellite
data but it’s difficult to do it in a way that’s meaningful,” says Brunskill who
wants to work with other businesses to offer his curated images as a bolt­on
– to zoom in on your tent at Glastonbury through the festival app, for
example.
It will be fascinating to see which of these nine entrepreneurs goes the
furthest in the new space race.
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