Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:00] Dallas Campbell: Hello space travellers, and welcome to Outer Orbit. In these short bonus episodes, we're going to be continuing the conversation, backstage as it were, from our main episodes, focusing in on a particular topic or a point of view or an idea that took our fancy. In today's episode, we're joined by Elie Allouis to explore the life cycle of a space mission. What's changed in the last decade? What's coming in the future? How can we keep sustainability as an idea at the very forefront of the conversation? For this discussion, we were recording on location in the Catapult's in orbit servicing and manufacturing facility at Westcott. If you'd like to watch our robotics episode, you can, featuring Ellie and our panel of experts, head over to the Catapult's YouTube channel.
What do we call you? A space roboticist? you've got all kinds of fancy job titles. I don't really know where to start.
[00:01:00] Elie Allouis: Oh, that's a very interesting one.
[00:01:03] Dallas Campbell: Maybe you're not a space roboticist. Did I just dream that? Or...
did
[00:01:05] Elie Allouis: No, exactly, I'm leading the advanced concept and robotics team at Airbus and this is exactly what we do. Space, robots, what's not to like?
[00:01:15] Dallas Campbell: It's all to like. Now earlier on in In-Orbit, in the main podcast, we were talking about robots in space and InOrbit manufacturing and I suppose I'm really interested in perhaps for those people who aren't so involved in space, maybe you could just take us through the life cycle of a space mission, if you like, because it's changing rapidly. In the old days, you would have a rocket with, like, a satellite on it. The rocket would go up, deploy the satellite and then the rocket would blow up and then we'd hear no more about it. But that's all changing and I'm just wondering if you could take us through some of those changes and on what the life cycle is at the moment, and how it's gonna change.
[00:01:51] Elie Allouis: Exactly. I think this is a really interesting topic right now and I think as the ecosystem develops, both for the low-Earth orbit and then going beyond, we can see all these kind of mission concepts evolving as well. Up to now, I think, as you said, it was very much one payload, one spacecraft, we launch it, it's a kind of find and forget business. But increasingly, we're a bit more aware of the sustainability aspects, both in terms of how we use resources on the ground to produce these spacecraft, but also what happens to them once they're up there. So we talked about this active debris removal, how to remove debris as part of the main discussion, but currently we're looking at the whole life cycle and how we can evolve that life cycle to maybe make use of these assets in the future in space.
[00:02:40] Dallas Campbell: Okay, so imagine I am, I don't know, a communications company or something and I want to put some stuff into orbit and look after it and what happens. So where do we start and where do we end up?
[00:02:52] Elie Allouis: So currently as the customer will have a payload, they want a platform to be built around it and then we launch all of that into space and we operate it for, say, about 15 years. So, currently, we have this payload and you know, if you think about it, the structure of the spacecraft is going to be used for approximately about eight minutes, but for the rest of the mission, 15 years, it doesn't have a strong purpose. So it's certainly an opportunity to think differently how we can build this new platform, these new services, in different ways.
[00:03:30] Dallas Campbell: So, well, why don't we talk about in terms of rockets first and there's obviously been a step change in rocket design in that it's pretty recently now that we've seen rockets being reused and recycled and that's presumably had a huge impact in the cost of getting things up into space.
[00:03:47] Elie Allouis: It does and I think this is kind of part of, you know, sustainability, it comes in many forms and guises. So from the point where we start to design a spacecraft, and we want to use just as much materials as we need to, so we're increasingly introducing more 3D printing to make more complex parts, where before we had 15, 16 parts.
[00:04:10] Dallas Campbell: Are you talking about 3D printing in space or...
[00:04:12] Elie Allouis: So this is 3D printing for the actual spacecraft that we designed on the ground. So rather than having 15 parts, we can just make it into just one that is using even less material than before. So you don't have to mine a big bullet and just mission it down, you're only using the, whatever materials you need.
[00:04:29] Dallas Campbell: So optimised manufacture of spacecraft to begin with. So completely redesigning the way that we build spacecraft, I see.
[00:04:37] Elie Allouis: Exactly and after that, you can think of, you know, How can we do it differently? And if you want to launch, you know, a set of payloads, currently we have this kind of one platform, one payload. But in the future, we could foresee the setup of a shared platforms, what is called payload clustering. You kind of launch spacecraft that becomes your primary structure, on which you can actually deploy multiple payloads and this really allows you as a customer, as a user of this technology, to manage obsolescence because over a few years you can come up, retrieve your payloads and bring a new one in. So where on the ground, we have maybe new PCs, new generations of PCs coming every two to three years, we can't really use that kind of pace in space.
[00:05:26] Dallas Campbell: When you say retrieve a payload, just tell us what that means. Are you talking about retrieving it in space? Because at the moment, generally we think satellites are in orbit, and they're there until the end of life and they either stay there forever, or they burn up in the atmosphere. So you're talking about actually being able to retrieve things in orbit using robotics.
[00:05:45] Elie Allouis: Exactly, so this is one of the ways you can manage your payloads. so you can bring new missions, putting all your new payloads on this kind of shared platform, you can either retrieve your payloads to bring it down because we have potentially these new launchers, reusable launchers that could come up and down and more of a, you know, on a regular basis.
[00:06:08] Dallas Campbell: We're not, we don't have those yet just to be clear. We're just... okay.
[00:06:12] Elie Allouis: So, what we're doing, and this is part of our job as well, is kind of looking at the horizon, how things are shaping up in terms of logistics to get from ground to space, but how we're going to operate these assets in space.
[00:06:27] Dallas Campbell: Presumably the whole idea is if you want the space economy to work, it has to be a, you know, this idea of the circular economy that has to be the old days of just getting rid of rockets and letting rockets burn up to deliver one payload, that's completely unsustainable from where you are at Airbus, are we there do you think?
[00:06:44] Elie Allouis: I think over the last few years, we've seen a convergence of technology, of visions and impetus as well, because we can see that the way we're doing it is not sustainable. So we are actually working today on concept where we have in space factories that could take almost like a flatback satellite that you kind of, put together robotically, in space. Then we're looking at how we can standardise some of these things that we can take payload and elements out of the spacecraft and replace them with more upgraded parts.
[00:07:18] Dallas Campbell: That's interesting, I mean, I suppose building things in orbit. I mean, imagine something like the JWS telescope and one of the amazing things about that was they managed to kind of fold it up origami style and cram it into the fairing of a rocket and that was the only way to do it. But presumably building big structures like that, you wouldn't need to do that in the future, you could, like you say, Ikea in space, you could just sort of build things and assemble them and you wouldn't be limited to the size of a rocket fairing.
[00:07:46] Elie Allouis: Exactly, I think we're kind of reaching the limits of what we can do with rocket fairings. Of course, with new launches and really big launches, we can do more things, but I think the way to go, it's going to be a mixture of deployables, but also building in space directly with robotic, with robots and maybe crews of robots to assemble really large structures. We're looking at how can we design differently to make antennas are a hundred meters across or, you know, we're looking at asset that could be kilometers across.
[00:08:17] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, I was thinking one of those early books of mine that I was mentioning, they always talked about space based solar power and that's a subject that's, we're genuinely thinking about, you know, in reality now, but that would be impossible to do unless you can actually manufacture things in space. Presumably you need to build very large solar arrays, which you couldn't just, you know, stick on a rocket and send up from Earth, you would need to assemble in space.
[00:08:42] Elie Allouis: Yes, and I think as we try to flesh out this concept, we understand a little bit better what are the logistics of bringing all of that feedstock and these parts in space. There's an element of assembly, definitely of, for the complex parts and some part that can actually be manufactured from raw feedstock. We're looking at, at some of those, we are breadboarding, prototyping them to see what works and what doesn't.
[00:09:07] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, it's pretty amazing. So sustainability is, seems to be at the key of, everything that we're going to be doing in space. Less waste, more recycling, building in space, manufacturing in space, assembling in space, that seems to be the way to go. I'm just, I'm curious at Airbus, all the kind of experts we get on, I always want to know kind of what the most exciting thing that you're working on at the moment, with your view, looking forward, what's the thing that you go, Oh my God, that's going to be amazing.
[00:09:37] Elie Allouis: I think it's difficult to kind of pull out just a single thing. I think what we can see and what we're involved in is a lot of different, almost like, technology building blocks, things that we can see mature up to the point where we can actually foresee these kind of concepts becoming reality. From the robotic systems, from the control, how we're going to plan these operations and the kind of ultimate goal about, you know, building these large infrastructures in space.
[00:10:04] Dallas Campbell: Just from, I just, from interested from a UK perspective, like how influential is the UK in particularly sort of robotic development? Like, are we kind of somewhere near the top of the pile of the work that we're doing here? I mean, obviously other countries do it as well, but I'm just interested in the UK particularly, like where we are. Do we need to be investing more? Are we kind of leading the pack?
[00:10:25] Elie Allouis: That's a very good question. I think, of course the US has been extremely active in the field. I think Europe is coming up and I think there's been, you know, we can see the whole ecosystem developing in Europe and the UK, and I think currently, I think the UK is actually punching above its weight in some of these areas because, there's been a, you know, a strong push to explore and flesh out some of these concepts and try to support the economy through kind of SMEs, academies and large primes to support these activities. So certainly I think the UK is in a very good position to kind of be a lead in some of these areas.
[00:11:04] Dallas Campbell: Elie, thank you very much for coming. It's been a pleasure and it's fascinating to talk to you. Thank you.
[00:11:08] Elie Allouis: My pleasure. Thank you.
[00:11:11] Dallas Campbell: To hear future episodes, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app. And to find out a bit more about how space is empowering industries between episodes, why not visit the Catapult website or join them or me on social media?