The new space era

The Moon landings and the space race made a huge impression on me as a child. To see such pioneers made so many of us dream. We are now in a fresh boom. Humans are returning to the Moon. Space technology is the backbone of our daily lives. So, you may ask, what do early pioneers like Airbus have to offer in this ‘new space’ era and how is this influencing our enduring quest for evolution?

I first joined the industry as a space radar engineer and played my small part in the industry’s steady development over the latter part of the 20th century. But in recent years change has been more dramatic. We’ve seen this rush of new entrants in the market and exciting space start-ups are trialling many new business models and approaches that are helping push our industry forward. But this doesn’t mean they’re the only ones. As JFK said, “Those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future” and Airbus has no intention of doing that. 

As the industry continues its evolution, at Airbus we are proactively developing flexible, game-changing technologies and solutions that help solve global challenges and make life better on Earth.

Shaping the future of space

With our breakthrough innovations, we are improving the way space is utilised. For example in the telecoms domain where we are pioneering new types of satellites like Eutelsat Quantum and OneSat. For the first time, operators will be able to completely change what their satellites do in orbit by reprogramming them to adjust the coverage area and frequency band, even changing the orbital position – allowing them to serve any region, as well as adjust to new mission requirements in the blink of an eye. Previous satellites had some flexibility, but this is revolutionary.

The OneSat flexible satellite ? Airbus

Then there are constellations, the word on everyone’s lips… Their introduction has literally changed how we make satellites. Our Airbus OneWeb Satellites joint venture has rethought satellite design to produce 650 low-Earth orbit satellites for one of the largest ‘mega constellations’, providing affordable high-speed Internet access around the world. Until recently, satellites were custom designed and built individually for a specific purpose. Today, we’ve made it possible to build satellites the way we build planes: going from a few per year to up to a couple per day. What’s more, we’ve embedded this new thinking into all our products, standardising designs, building more parts of our spacecraft concurrently and taking a learn-fast, fail-fast test approach, to name just a few.

Video courtesy of OneWeb ? 2020

What about new financing? The Pléiades Neo story is one example. 20 years ago, Airbus Earth observation satellites were made purely for government customers. Today, we are self-financing four of our own, brand new, very-high-resolution satellites to keep pace with the growing desire to make use of data from space. Owned and operated by Airbus as part of the world’s largest Earth observation satellite fleet, they will provide the highest resolution imagery on the market, more often, via the OneAtlas cloud platform.

Pléiades Neo ? Airbus

Digitising and simplifying

Right across Airbus we are connecting our design, manufacturing, supply-chain management and service support end-to-end, for spacecraft and aircraft alike.

Numerous digital capabilities are at various stages of industrialisation from prototyping to implementation at scale. And no idea is too far-fetched. Introduction of video gaming technologies to support 3D satellite design is a prime example. By applying these COTS technologies to our business and processes, Airbus has gained three key differentiators – data fusion, real-time collaboration and virtual/augmented reality – over standard 3D software.

? Airbus

Making data-driven decisions

Artificial Intelligence is also bringing impressive results. It is helping us monitor satellite health and learn lessons from in-orbit performance to make future spacecraft even better. Our engineers draw on telemetry data pooled in a data lake to create algorithms for all stages of the lifecycle, providing actionable insights on performance. We also see potential for AI in enabling ground segment automation, key to efficient management of large or mega satellite constellations.

AI is proving equally important for Airbus’ satellite imagery services. Work first started using Google’s open-source Tensor Flow AI-algorithm for automatic cloud detection, removing manual checks to ensure clouds weren’t obscuring the image before delivery to customers. This has evolved into automatic change detection of objects such as cars, boats or planes. What’s behind this success is the billions of square kilometers of imagery dating back to 1986 that Airbus has ‘fed’ into machine learning platforms – and the more data machines learn from, the better the result. Playing the long game has its advantages.

Change detection powered by AI ? Airbus

Space services for all

When I think back to the early 2000s when I was leading our Intelligence teams and compare with how our data was accessed then, I am delighted to see that we are today truly democratising this. The UP42 platform brings together Earth data and analytics from multiple sources, so that developers from start-ups and SMEs to the world’s biggest brands can apply algorithms to build their own solutions.

And up on the ISS, Airbus is again making space accessible for all. Most of the ISS’ experimental facilities are inside but our Bartolomeo platform enables external payload hosting providing access to an ‘in space’ environment where you can look out into space or back down to Earth. We are seeing significant interest in areas ranging from Earth observation to robotics, material science and astrophysics – and often from customers who thought accessing space was financially prohibitive. 

The Bartolomeo platform (right hand side, below Dragon vehicle) attached to the ISS ? NASA

Out of this world

But let me take you a step beyond… Being able to manufacture and assemble in space, using 3D printing and in-orbit robots, might sound like science fiction but Airbus is already working on making the first orbital factory, hundreds of kilometres above Earth.

With significant advantages over the traditional approach – where everything is produced on Earth and subsequently transported to space – our work covers three main areas. The first uses 3D printers in space. These will use metal, regolith (Moon dust), or will even recycle manmade objects already in space as source material to print new parts like equipment, tooling, rovers and habitats. By the end of this decade, such printers could be deployed on the Moon to make structures for a rover or lunar habitat.

The second area is in-space assembly, which can be used to create very large structures like antennas. This requires a high level of robotic operation, which is the third area. We are developing our own robotic arm and working on control using virtual reality and visual servoing. We’re bringing these technologies to life at Airbus’ robotic labs across Europe and aim to test them from a robotic facility on our Bartolomeo platform by the mid-2020s. 

Another building block in extending human use of space is the Airbus-invented ROXY (Regolith to OXYgen and Metals Conversion) process. Together with partners from industry and research institutions – in a world first – we have proven the ability to extract oxygen from Moon dust without using any materials from Earth. With oxygen indispensable for all human space activities, this new ROXY production method could revolutionise human activities on the lunar surface.

A ROXY ‘factory’ to make oxygen on the Moon ? Airbus

Protecting this precious resource

Yet, none of this is possible if we don’t look after space. We need to learn from what we’ve done to our Earth and make sure we use space sustainably. At Airbus we believe we have a responsibility to future generations to do just that. We are supporting a range of initiatives from working with the World Economic Forum on an eco-label for space missions (the Space Sustainability Rating) to promoting space traffic management solutions that minimise the risk of collisions. We were also the first company to test technologies in orbit – a harpoon, a net and a vision-based navigation system – to clear out space junk. As space constellations become a reality, there will be an increased need to remove satellites from orbit at end of life. This is already in-built for the OneWeb constellation and Airbus has made it its business to ensure it can provide such services on all its satellites.  

? Airbus

At the heart of all we do

Of course none of this would be possible without our thousands of creative and innovative Airbus people. Their desire to continually make the impossible possible is what drives everything we do – and I salute them!

On the ground and in space, Airbus is reshaping the future of the space industry – hand in hand with our company purpose to pioneer sustainable aerospace for a safe and united world.