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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:04] Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome to Outer Orbit, our little companion podcast this week live from the ISAM Conference 2025. I'm your host, Dallas Campbell, and today we're gonna be hearing all about the importance of standardisation We've got Gary Cannon, the Space Segment Lead from the Satellite Applications Catapult and Stella Tkatchova the program manager from the European Innovation Council.
[00:00:31] Gary Cannon: I'd like to set the stage by explaining why standards for ISAM are not just helpful, but essential to unlocking the next phase of sustainable and scalable space activity.
We're entering era, were servicing, upgrading, refueling, and even assembling spacecraft on orbit are no longer the stuff of science fiction. Missions like Northrop Grummans, MEVS and MRV, Astroscale's Elsa and ADRAS Missions, ESA's ClearSpace, UKSA's Cosmic and Clear Missions have shown that ISAM technologies are not only possible they're increasingly necessary.
Well, here's the challenge. The orbital environment is congested, diverse, and largely unregulated when it comes to servicing interfaces, safety protocols, or design principles. Without standards, every mission becomes bespoke, which means expensive to design, hard to insure, and nearly impossible to scale. Standards provide the common language that enables safe and interoperable servicing operations, lower mission risk and cost, easier regulatory approval and a stronger case for investment in this growing sector.
So what's the role of standards in de-risking the market? From a technical standpoint, standards underpin interoperability between services and clients across different orbits and even among nations. They define what a docking mechanism should look like, how a spacecraft should communicate during rendezvous, and how to ensure false tolerance.
From a commercial perspective, standards reduce ambiguity. If an operator knows that their satellite can be serviced by any number of providers, thanks for a modular or standardized interface, that's a business case. If insurers know that safe proximity operations follow agreed best practices, that's a risk profile they can underwrite. If regulators can see clearly defined, internationally accepted procedures, that's a policy they can support.
So where are we now? The good news is that we're not starting from scratch.
Now is the time to begin aligning these efforts, identifying the gaps, and mapping a way forward. So what's at stake? This isn't just the technical exercise. Standards influence who leads, who benefits, and how fast we grow. If we don't define open, fair, and interoperable frameworks now we risk a future of proprietary ecosystems, limited service and compatibility, and increased orbital risk.
Today we've designed the session to reflect the breadth and depth of the standardization challenge and the opportunities therein.
With that, it's my pleasure to welcome our keynote speaker, Stella Tkatchova is the program manager for Space Systems at the European Innovation Council, and has managed the Artez Indigo Private Public Partnership. Gov SATCOM O3B and the Copernicus Sentinel One and Three programs. She's co-founded a company in the ADR domain, worked on Galileo and ISS programs at Aztec, and holds a PhD by the faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the Technical University of Delft.
She's a published author and podcaster highlighting the commercialization of space technology, space debris mitigation, in-Orbit servicing, it's a long list, active debris removal, in space logistics and cis lunar exploration, and is the founder and Former Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Space Technology of Management and Innovation.
[00:03:31] Stela Tkatchova: Thank you very much, Gary. Thank you very much for the honor to be invited.What is the EIC role in the space industry?
So the European Innovation Council funds game changing, high risk innovation, and the beauty of the EIC is that we funded from very real low TRL to high TRL. Our program is actually bottom up with Pathfinder Open and Accelerator Open and top down with challenges defined by the program managers. Me as the program manager for space systems, actually not only I define the challenges, I sit in the evaluations, but I also manage the space portfolio.
So the space portfolio has three pillars. Space Debris Sustainability, which collects projects, looking at removing debris, remediation, mitigation, but also In-Orbit satellite servicing, active debris removal. Enabling Space Technologies is all the subsystems of a satellite. We have propulsion, panel antennas, but we also have in space manufacturing of solar arrays which is very strongly linked to the ISAM a domain. And the third pillar is Earth Observation and Meteorology, so as you see, we have an extremely diverse portfolio.
We know very well that current satellites are designed, built and launched into space not to be service and repaired, and we know that there is a lack of plug and play architecture, and that's why we are pushing and discussing very much modularity and modular platforms.
What I've observed is when we launched the course of the last, two or three years, I observed diverse concepts, for example, for space debris remediation and in space recycling. Clearly the experiment phase.
What I observed in some of the accelerator projects doing in-Orbit satellite servicing, they'll be developing a robotic arm, which will be at the certain TRL level, but that the grippers will be at different TRL levels. So there is a lot of complexity and the TRL levels of the different technologies or concepts are completely different.
The other issue is also time to market too long, unknown profits and unclear markets. Despite the successful launch of Math One and Math Two, five years ago. Very different value chains. In the different segments, and as you mentioned, Gary, interoperability.
The direct benefits from interoperability and direct cost savings are not clearly defined, a topic on which I do believe we need to touch on strongly in the future.
Opportunities, we need to have more and more technology demos, and that will be opportunities like the ISO platform mission or the program we have this year for in-orbit satellite servicing, funding, proximity, operation in space, refueling, and so on.
Cos components are widely used. There is actually at the moment initial demand driven by institutional customers, and also another very important aspect is, and this is to my colleagues from ESA on the zero debris, debris mitigation and remediation integrated in spacecraft design for the future is a critical importance, and they're working towards that. So I do believe that ISAM is an emerging market opportunity.
So this is our roadmap today. In 2023 we had the Pathfinder challenge about in-space solar energy harvesting. We selected nine projects, they're working in three working groups, solar cells, wireless power, transmission space, green proportion, and customer driven applications, and there you see ISAM already in-orbit, satellite services inside. We just closed the call of the Pathfinder on space debris mitigation and remediation and in space recycling, which I do believe is a topic of huge relevance for this audience. And finally, we have the topic of 50 million for IOS is space transportation and space-based cyber resilience.
Other challenges is when we called for the space debris call we received many, many proposals on space debris mitigation and remediation, very few on in-space recycling. Now in the role as a program manager, we contribute to the Pathfinder, which are the committee. So the independent experts who assess and they make sure that there is a balance of projects Where the projects have to have a shared component or potential complementarity, they have to have common synergies and work together. Having projects in mitigation and remediation where you have such a diversity on the robotic arms, the orbiting mechanism, magnets, but also propellant list technologies like, lasers status, solar concentration, makes it very difficult to talk about standards or creates a automatic gap. Not to talk about in space recycling or reusing orbital assets, which was more focused actually on mechanical. But we received some interesting proposals also on laser welding.
So this challenge was addressed by me as a program manager by actually requesting the projects who apply to do portfolio management. What does that mean? Every project will propose what are the gaps they want to identify in the technology, regulatory, transition to technology innovation, some of them proposed even cost benefit analysis, early commercialization, and so on. So even before they selected, these projects have to propose some ideas, and then later on during the evaluation, the experts also take under consideration this aspect.
So what happened was that there was clearly gaps in the regulation, and here I put on purpose that I would like to have the working groups, particularly for this space challenge to work together because these to contribute to better understanding or improved the standards and regulative framework. So this is an important aspect because all the projects, when they're selected, they will work together and they will present all the results of their research activities, either identifying regulation gaps, scientific market technological into a strategic portfolio plan, a common one. So this is a way which we are addressing here at the EIC, this question.
Now, on the other hand, the EIC is an executive agency of the European Commission. We do not do policies. My colleagues from DG DEFIS and I work in close collaboration with them. I provide them with the recommendations from the different working groups.
So, in conclusion, what I saw in our space portfolio the last two years linked to this topic, very strong interest for space debris mitigation and proposing technologies for remediation.
However, I expected much more on in space recycling. There were very few proposals, very, very few, and that was difficult while we were building the portfolio. However, most of the proposals did make a very clear link that the technologies they proposing for, active debris removal, robotic arms or grippers and so on there also the next future application is ISAM and ISOS. The proposals, all of them, which are selected at the moment are very much complimentary to the future evolution of ISAM missions.
What did I see? Space-based SSA, a lot of AI machine learning for autonomous space operations, a lot of proposals for robotic arms gripper, but very excitingly, also, laser a blazer technologies.
These are the areas where I observed growing interests. I do believe in some areas we'll be mainly institutionally driven, but others will be really market driven. It's too early to say which one will succeed, but we will see, and this is the long-term future, I foresee. I think that all the capabilities we're developing of today will help us for future learner missions. Thank you very much.
[00:13:08] Dallas Campbell: To hear future episodes of In-Orbit, don't forget. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and head over to YouTube to watch video versions of all our discussions, and if you'd like to find out more about how space is empowering your industry, visit the Catapult website or join them on social media.