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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:00] Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome to a brand new shiny series of In-Orbit, the podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world, brought to you by the Satellite Applications Catapult. I'm your host Dallas Campbell and in today's episode we are kicking off this new series recording on location in the Catapult's In-Orbit Servicing and Manufacturing facility.
The space economy in the UK is changing at a rapid rate. In-Orbit Servicing and Manufacturing, or IOSM, is set to revolutionise this economy and robotics is going to play a key role. From servicing satellites In-Orbit, using autonomous robots, to manufacturing large structures In-Orbit, IOSM is where cutting edge technology meets the vast expanse of space, but it's capabilities here on Earth that ensure that these in space operations are successful.
Very exciting! First episode, we're kicking things off, we're out of the studio, we're in the Catapult, I've got to get this right, In-Orbit Servicing and Manufacturing Facility and today we're going to be looking at all things robots, space robots, with our fantastic panel of experts. Delighted to be joined here today by Jeremy Hadall, who is the robotics lead at the Satellite Applications Catapult. Jeremy, welcome. just a little bit about who you are, what you do here in this exciting place?
[00:01:39] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, so as you say, I'm the robotics lead for the Catapult, and this facility is my baby, it's what I look after, it's what we develop, what we do here, particularly in this part of the facility, is we use it to help people test out their In-Orbit servicing manufacturing technologies. So, robots and things that help people do In-Orbit Servicing and Manufacturing.
[00:01:56] Dallas Campbell: We're going to unpack what that is in a moment. When you say it's your baby, so did you kind of conceive this as it were? This was like, I've got, did you wake up and go...
[00:02:04] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, I was, when I joined the catapult, I was given an idea of what this could look like and I think my first day was, here's the idea, off you go and that was it. So this is kind of all my fault, guys.
[00:02:16] Dallas Campbell: Great, okay, well we're going to explore that in a bit and sitting next to you, we've got Elie Allouis who is the robotics system expert at Airbus.
[00:02:25] Dr. Elie Allouis: So, yes, I'm the Advanced Concepts and Robotics Lead in the UK at Airbus. It is a multidisciplinary team that comprises a whole range of skills to support mission concepts and design future robotic systems for future applications in space.
[00:02:41] Dallas Campbell: And of course everyone knows Airbus because they make aeroplanes, but Airbus also make spacecraft and other things for the space industry. So welcome, thank you very much. Sitting next to me we've got Azmat Hossain, Business Development Director at Extend Robotics. So first of all, what's Extend Robotics and what do you do for them?
[00:03:01] Azmat Hossain: Thank you for having me. So Extend Robotics, we're saying that we're building the most intuitive human robot interface. So it's the connection between humans and robots, but it will also enable various other important critical tools, such as training robots and managing robots, not only in space, but also in earth and then being able to, for humans to connect with robots using complete, fully immersive VR.
[00:03:25] Dallas Campbell: I'd just say you are all human, by the way, as far as I can tell so far. Well, we should introduce the robot elephant in the room, this one here. Jeremy, what, who, why?
[00:03:35] Jeremy Hadall: So this is Mani and the robot you can't see behind the cameras is called Sol. There's a complicated Norse mythology behind this, but the moon always chases the sun, so Mani always chases the Sol. Normally we use Sol as what we call the service, or the client, so that's where we're trying to get our equipment to carry out our In-Orbit servicing manufacturing tasks and Mani has to chase it and then catch up with it and so on the end of Mani, we've got a dummy spacecraft at the moment, but normally on the end of Mani, we would have other robots or sensors or things like that, that are trying to chase after Sol.
[00:04:05] Dallas Campbell: Got it and was that your idea, the Norse mythology? Did you kind of have a cheese dream? You're like, I know let's go Norse.
[00:04:11] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, in a previous company we had Loki, thor, so we couldn't have Loki and Thor because that's already been taken, so we had to come up with different names, but...
[00:04:18] Dallas Campbell: I've noticed that there's, well, all the offices in this building are all kind of space related. Right, okay, before we go any further, let's just establish where we are. Where are we in the world? Let's start big. We're at the Westcott Venture Park. What happens there?
[00:04:32] Jeremy Hadall: So Westcott Venture Park, just outside Aylesbury, it's an old RAF base for the last 50 or so years, or the first 50 or so years after the Second World War. It was the UK's rocket propulsion facility, very secretive base.
[00:04:47] Dallas Campbell: It's not that secret now.
[00:04:49] Jeremy Hadall: Not that secret now. Great big sign on the top, but prior to that, you know, very secretive base, wasn't on any Maps. Mobile phones don't work here still.
[00:04:56] Dallas Campbell: I've noticed
[00:04:56] Jeremy Hadall: that!
Yeah, that's a legacy.
[00:04:58] Dallas Campbell: Basically, it's kind of like Area 51, but in Oxford, but not really.
[00:05:03] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, not really. No, but there's a lot of rocket propulsion work still done here. So there's a number of companies still on site who carry out rocket propulsion work and test fire rockets. I noticed as I came in, some of the flags were flying. So somebody might fire a rocket some stage this afternoon in their test facility. So that still happens here. Mostly that's orbital rockets that are quite small rockets rather than very large ones that makes lots of big noise and things like that, and there's a lot of other space companies here, including ourselves and the catapult here, we operate a number of different buildings. This one, which is our In-Orbit Servicing and Manufacturing facility, our future network development center and our drone port as well.
[00:05:40] Dallas Campbell: Right, so that's the phrase we need to look at. In-Orbit Servicing and Manufacturing, IOSM and just for those who are listening and aren't watching, let's just sort of describe this room. We're in a very long room. How long is it? 25m?
[00:05:54] Jeremy Hadall: 27 long.
[00:05:56] Dallas Campbell: That was...
[00:05:56] Jeremy Hadall: Not far off yeah
[00:05:57] Dallas Campbell: There we go and what is that? 10 metres high, perhaps?
[00:06:00] Jeremy Hadall: it's about that high.
[00:06:01] Dallas Campbell: It's black
[00:06:01] Jeremy Hadall: Yep.
[00:06:02] Dallas Campbell: It's sort of matte blackboard black. Along the wall are rows of cameras and right down the middle, we've got this track with a giant robot arm on it and attached to the robot arm is what looks like a, some kind of CubeSat. It's your standard satellite covered in, gold foil and so this is where you test things out, this is where you test...
[00:06:24] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah. Well, yeah, so this is, I mean, this room is black, as you say, it's completely matte black.
[00:06:29] Dallas Campbell: Is that to make it look like space? Is that, we're in space, is that the idea?
[00:06:32] Jeremy Hadall: The reason we made it matte black is because when you're actually In-Orbit, it's not completely dark. Space is not dark at all, it's quite bright, but we want everything in the room to disappear into the background, which is why it's matte black. So at the moment, you mentioned the cameras, all the cameras are flashing blue lights, most of them. That's just because we've left the lights on, but normally they're all off, so you can't see anything in here and the robots are black as well, so they disappear into...
[00:06:54] Dallas Campbell: And why do you need everything to blend in? I mean, this is just a test place. So what's the...
[00:06:58] Jeremy Hadall: So it's because the only thing we're really interested in is the gold bit on the end of the robots. So the robots in here mostly are pretty dumb, standard, off the shelf industrial robots and we use them in very novel ways, but they're not the most important part in here. The most important part is the bits that we have on the end of the robots that enable us to carry out servicing and manufacturing in space.
[00:07:21] Dallas Campbell: Okay, so that's the location, that's where we are, we're in a long, black room. Elie, just explain to us this robot that's behind us, it's a very large robot arm with this kind of pretend satellite on the end of it, what is its function like? What is that here to do?
[00:07:36] Dr. Elie Allouis: So this facility can be used in a number of ways and we're starting developments for robotics, for In-Orbit activity, like servicing and capture. Up to a point, you can do it in your own facilities. Academia will have almost a scaled down version of this facility and same in some industrial entities. Here we're kind of scaling things up, it's a large rail, it's a large manipulator and the idea is to use it in a more representative manner using the full scale system. So you have a full scale robotic arm, for example, capturing a representative scale target or client. So you have that element of scale and also the way the client, that box can actually move in space is of interest, is important to tune some of the algorithms for detection of that from a long distance and as we get closer and closer, we want to be able to maybe grasp it.
[00:08:34] Dallas Campbell: So that specific arm, that's in a way, we're kind of not interested in that arm. That arm is there to mimic how a satellite or some kind of space object would behave in microgravity.
[00:08:45] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah.
[00:08:45] Dallas Campbell: Because I noticed, I mean, IOSM Yard, you call it, I mean, clearly not a yard, but it has that sort of, you think of the Mars Yard, you might have seen it, sort of JPL or at Stevenage, they've got a Mars Yard, I think. So it's that...
[00:08:57] Jeremy Hadall: It's that kind of...
[00:08:58] Dallas Campbell: ...facility or a neutral buoyancy tank, I guess, might be another.
[00:09:02] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, so this is another way of doing neutral buoyancy. We're just using the robots to create that microgravity environment. Neutral buoyancy is a great way of doing things, but it comes with a lot of challenges.
[00:09:11] Dallas Campbell: Things get wet.
[00:09:12] Jeremy Hadall: Things get very wet and all your robots have to be hardened against the water, so this is just another approach to doing it.
[00:09:18] Dallas Campbell: Right, so Elie, let's say, you mentioned that word client, you talked about your satellite as a client. Imagine I'm a client and I've got my satellite, maybe you could just take us through the process of what testing would look like. So here I am floating in outer space, I want to do something, you know, I want to manufacture or service. What would we see in here?
[00:09:41] Dr. Elie Allouis: So as Jeremy alluded, we have these two manipulators carrying on the one hand the servicer, in this particular case and the clients, the spacecraft we want to grasp.
[00:09:53] Dallas Campbell: So the, hang on, so the servicer, so that's what people can't see if they're watching this, behind the camera, there is another gold satellite, but there's a kind of standard robot arm on that?
[00:10:03] Dr. Elie Allouis: Correct. So on this particular one we have an Airbus robotic manipulator that we are testing currently and this is all about emulating these kind of mission concepts where we actually grasp a possible client, spacecraft, as in a spacecraft we want to grab in the orbit or to grab in service, this is the place where we can do that. It allows us to exercise it with a realistic setup and realistic hardware.
[00:10:30] Dallas Campbell: And I'm looking at that robot arm, and it's, well, if you imagine what a robot arm looks like. But on the front of it, there is a kind of circular thing and a cross. So maybe you could just explain to me what, on the business end of that robot arm, what I'm looking at.
[00:10:42] Dr. Elie Allouis: Yeah. So this is our VISPA robotic manipulator produced by Airbus and it has a sensor suite close to, whether what we'll have, what we don't see here is a grasping tool and we need to provide the robots with the necessary information to track the grasping locations on the client and for that we have a sensor suite with lights and various other sensors.
[00:11:06] Dallas Campbell: So basically, when you're testing, the idea is that your Airbus robot arm will come and grapple with our satellite and do whatever needs to be done and this one behind me will behave as if it was in space, so you can work out what needs to be done. Yeah and I suppose we're fairly used to robots in space. I mean, we think about the International Space Station, things like the Canadarm is used for grappling incoming spacecraft and bringing it closer to the station, for example and I think there's a kind of humanoid sort of robot on the International Space Station. I'm not quite sure what it does. It does look quite good, but the idea of kind of robotics in space is not a particularly new thing, certainly on the space station.
[00:11:48] Jeremy Hadall: Certainly on the Space Station, it's not, and most of the Space Station was built with a robotic arm attached to the shuttle originally.
[00:11:54] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:11:55] Jeremy Hadall: I think what's different with, certainly with VISPA and similar arms now is they are smaller by necessity, not just for launch rate, but also just for the task they're carrying out and the aim is to make them less complex. So to operate the Canadarm is a really complicated task on the ISS. To be able to operate these kind of robots autonomously, that's the ultimate aim. In-Orbit away from a manned spacecraft is the ultimate aim and so yeah, these robots are much smaller, much cheaper. Ultimately, that's got to be the way we go forward to make this a realistic thing.
[00:12:30] Dallas Campbell: Azmat, let's bring you in here as a sort of business mind here. What are the benefits of being able to manufacture and service objects in space?
[00:12:39] Azmat Hossain: Well, we're going to the next level of, I would say, evolution in space and when that comes in with a lot of different smaller companies and a lot of new ideas that are being generated, how not only with space, but other sectors are also developing. There's a host of really evolutionary technologies that are being developed. So, this will enable us, Humans to go out in space and do things which was not possible before and we could utilise the, you know, the sort of advancement could bring in other benefits which was not available before, such as lower cost, better telecommunications, better, more advanced things.
[00:13:19] Dallas Campbell: I I suppose we should just establish that, I mean, the way things work at the moment, we send something up into space, a satellite and once it's up there, there's not a lot you can do with it. Once it's there, it either kind of works or it doesn't work and once it comes to the end of its life, it just stays there forever or burns up in the atmosphere, but suddenly having stuff like this presumably means that it's going to open up a whole new, well, a whole new realm of being able to fix things and make things and...
[00:13:43] Azmat Hossain: Yeah, so we're going to the next level, which is like having this sort of arm or this sort of technology. We can open up a lot more, I would say, an agile way of doing things.
[00:13:51] Dallas Campbell: What kind stuff would this stuff be able to do? Have you got any examples of things that we could make or...
[00:13:56] Azmat Hossain: I mean, space would be the, of course, the extension of the Earth in the next level. So as we move on and we have limitations in the Earth in terms of space and in terms of like, you know, how habitable areas so we can go into space and do things, so manufacture parts in space where maybe even satellites, some of these we can be used to habitate the moon or other planets and for that we need to manufacture parts, we need to manufacture a host of things and this could be done in space itself using robotics. But as mentioned before, it was not possible because of the limitations and technologies, but now because of these advancements, we are going to the next level.
[00:14:32] Dallas Campbell: So is the central idea of this, you know, we're limited in terms of the size of things we can put up in into orbit, because of the shape of rockets you can put a rocket fairing will only hold so much and yes, you can fold things up but suddenly having manipulators in space, robot arms we can build things In-Orbit, is that the main goal?
[00:14:54] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, I think that's, one of the main goals behind this is we're talking of mid March, Starship has just had its third launch. It was relatively successful, even though the vehicles didn't come by. Even with Starship, we're still limited by what we can launch into space. So having these kind of arms enables us to build so much bigger things.
[00:15:14] Dallas Campbell: So this is actually, we don't need bigger rockets necessarily, we just need smarter robots that can build In-Orbit. I mean, I think of things like, you know, we talk a lot about big solar panels in space, that type of thing, you know, if we're going to have that, obviously they're going to be very large, it'd be impossible to launch a huge solar panel into space.
[00:15:31] Jeremy Hadall: But once you've got that big thing into space, as you say, you've launched it into space and it's there and you can't really do much about it. These manipulators also give you the ability to go up and then to service those things, to repair bits, to refuel them, to change modules if you, as you need to. So they're opening up a whole new commercial opportunity for a huge range of companies.
[00:15:50] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. I mean, I think about servicing things in space, you know, you mentioned the space shuttle and the arm and of course fixing the Hubble Space Telescope involves humans going up there with spanners and what have you to do it. So this is in a way going to replace all that.
[00:16:06] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, it will and the thing we need to remember about Hubble was Hubble was designed for this. Most of the things that we're looking at at the moment have never been designed to be serviced or repaired. So Eddie will have to put a lot of clever things, almost AI, into the robot to enable him to be able to go and service something that hasn't been designed for it and was last seen on the launch pad.
[00:16:28] Dallas Campbell: But presumably, you know, once this kind of technology is working, as people design satellites, they will be designed to be fixed with this kind of technology in mind.
[00:16:38] Dr. Elie Allouis: Exactly and I think we're in a stage where, as you said before, it's kind of fire and forget it's there and right now we're looking at, you know, what can we do and how can we manage these platforms as they are today? And deorbiting may be one of the options for them at the end of their lives. But also, you know, what are the options to service them? How to upgrade some of their payload? How to refuel them and extend their lifetime? And as we're kind of doing that, we're going to kind of evolve towards a more kind of standardised and the development of standards for these modules that we can exchange, leading us to the point where it's very likely that we'll be able to send flat packed spacecraft and assemble them in space with space factories. That means that we're saving some launch costs, we're saving some mass and it will make things a little bit more economic and cheaper access to space.
[00:17:29] Dallas Campbell: Space IKEA.
[00:17:29] Azmat Hossain: Space IKEA.
[00:17:31] Dallas Campbell: That's interesting. I mean, I suppose, as our activities in space increase, this idea of the circular economy comes into play, where things have to ultimately pay for themselves and become profitable.
[00:17:43] Dr. Elie Allouis: Yes, I think where we kind of evolve moving our visions of view of spacecraft to more of a cradle to grave kind of things and understanding the impact of the design elements, the operation, the launch operation and then what happens at the end of that mission and increasingly, we're trying to see how we can maybe recycle it in the future, how we could actually revalorise it.
[00:18:06] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. So recycling, I suppose, is the other thing. So manufacturing, that's one thing, servicing, that makes sense, recycling, so normally, satellites, you chuck them up there and they stay up there forever, as I mentioned. But would the idea be that you could use technology like this to bring it back and reuse the materials of that satellite back on Earth?
[00:18:26] Azmat Hossain: Absolutely, I think there's lots of debris or, some of that could be recycled and we could operate the robots to do that recycling, either to be remanufactured into usual things on space, or we could bring that back on Earth in some way to be reused, yeah.
[00:18:44] Dallas Campbell: Is that, I mean, is that feasible? I mean, we talk a lot about clearing up Low Earth Orbit and space junk and there's been all sorts of exciting methods with, you know, harpoons and nets and all sorts of things. Is this going to be, do you think, a solution to space junk? Well, firstly, how important is clearing up space junk? Is it something we need to be thinking about now with seriousness?
[00:19:04] Jeremy Hadall: It is something we need to be thinking about now. You can almost equate it to plastics in the oceans. It's nowhere near as bad as plastics in the oceans. But if we don't tackle it now then it's could be. So you mentioned harpoons. So, harpoon is one way to capture a spacecraft. Chances are when you fire the harpoon into that spacecraft, you get lots of extra smaller bits of debris that come off it.
[00:19:24] Dallas Campbell: This is this Kessler Syndrome, I think it's called, which sounds very sci fi, but this idea that suddenly you get this exponential amount of stuff flying around at 25, 000 km an hour.
[00:19:33] Jeremy Hadall: So if anybody's watching or listening, has watched Gravity, that's the Sandra Bullock, George...
[00:19:39] Dallas Campbell: George Clooney.
[00:19:40] Jeremy Hadall: That's the Kessler Syndrome. You get to a point where there's so much debris that it becomes almost impossible to operate in space. Some people say we're kind of close to it, some people say it's already happened, I think we're probably not there, but it's reality. Do we know how many objects there are in Low Earth Orbit at the moment? Yes.
[00:19:58] Dallas Campbell: I forget, the number changes a lot.
[00:20:00] Jeremy Hadall: So ESA do an annual survey of this, and there's around about 8, 000 ish satellites that we know of In-Orbit, and about 6,000 of those are still operating. You then go down to smaller objects and you can count probably about up to around a million objects that are up to about 10 centimetres. Once you go below that, it becomes really hard to track it and the number of items exponentially increases and it's estimated to be over a million items. It could even be near a hundred million items as you get really small, but nobody's really sure.
[00:20:34] Dallas Campbell: I think that's the thing. It does seem to be quite sort of Wild West up there in terms of nobody quite knows what side of the road we drive on in Low Earth Orbit and sort of sorting out the kind of rules of the road seems to be an increasingly important thing, given that all kind of civilization now is pretty much dependent on what we do in space, even though people perhaps don't realise it.
[00:20:55] Azmat Hossain: There is a lot of the impact that space could make on Earth itself, and whether we realise it or not, of course there's data being provided from space and there's connection, internet connection that's provided by satellites and all, sorts of things that could, you know, impact.
[00:21:13] Dallas Campbell: So we've got this road, we've got this great technology robot arms that can actually now interact with satellites, fix them, move them around, presumably service them. We can build things just as about, give, us a sense of some of the sort of the companies that are thinking about this. Who are you talking to? What sorts of people?
[00:21:29] Azmat Hossain: So, in terms of space, we would, big primes like Airbus and all the, you know, other big companies to adopt this, robotics and of course, the new age robotics that's coming up, which is more smarter and takes to the next level for robots. That we're trying to create a sort of like modular system of robotics, which, will make it more affordable for companies, make it more easier to adopt.
[00:21:54] Dallas Campbell: What do you mean by modular robots?
[00:21:57] Azmat Hossain: A modular robot will mean that it will have a standard interface, it will have the ability for people to connect and train them, it will be able to do very complicated things, not just simple pick and place of processes, but it will have the adaptability to manage situations and also to be able to train remotely from anywhere in the world. Training the robots would be integral for the journey, yeah.
[00:22:20] Dallas Campbell: When you say training the robots, what does that mean? Because I'm, sort of just imagining a robot arm that you can kind of, I don't know, control with a joystick on Earth. But are you sort of implying that, you know, these robots will have a degree of autonomy where they can sort of fly around?
[00:22:33] Dr. Elie Allouis: Yes, I think, what we can see, for example, is that depending on the place and depending on the task, you have a whole spectrum of operation principles that you can use. So, for example, for rovers on the Moon and Mars, you have to have level autonomy, but you also want to be able to push a big red button. So, you can go for the fully autonomous, and this is really the target, it's almost like intent based actions, where the operator just tells the robot to do something, and the robot goes...
[00:23:02] Dallas Campbell: Like HAL 9000 in 2001, level of autonomy.
[00:23:05] Dr. Elie Allouis: Yes, that kind of level of autonomy and then you kind of go back to, you know, one level up, one level down, where you have a little bit more involvement from the operator, because maybe you're closer. You can have supervised tele operations, where you have some on board system that will prevent an operator from doing something he shouldn't and then you've got the fully tele operated scenario and this is where Azmat's software comes in, where it's all about the operation, real time of a robotic system or being able to train it to perform specific actions.
[00:23:38] Dallas Campbell: I mean, it seems quite, it's an exciting technology. I'm just interested in sort of where we are with it. Like how long before this type of technology is that we're actually going to see and is actually going to be used.
[00:23:49] Azmat Hossain: Well, I mean, if you see autonomous driving, it's taking a lot of testing and because there's a huge amount of data required and driving is just a few variables. You have the road, and then you have the other cars, and you have a map. But think about, like, if you're doing a task by a robot, then It will need lots of data and this data will have to come from somewhere. I mean, we can do simulations, researchers can do simulations, but how much realistic that can be is, there's limitations to that. So, we're trying to create a system which will be like a step by step process of training. So, in the initial stages it will be like, one operator operating one robot or two robots and doing things, helping them out if the robot gets stuck or if it gets lost in space, it could get lost, take control of that robot remotely.
[00:24:34] Dallas Campbell: It's pretty big space.
[00:24:35] Azmat Hossain: Yeah, that's the thing and especially in space, there are so many variables, it's quite impossible to plan everything.
[00:24:41] Dallas Campbell: Hence Jeremy, why this place is so important. I mean, is it, you know, when I think of things like flight simulators, pilots can get trained in a flight simulator, and flight simulators are so good, that you can go straight from the simulator, straight into the plane and fly a plane load of passengers to wherever you've got to go. Is that the aim for here? I'd like to just explore a little bit more about the room we're in at the moment, and what it's capable of.
[00:25:02] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, so that would be one of the outcomes for the facility and the facility, what the room we're sitting in is the first iteration of this. There's very few of these in the world. I mean, there's one in the US there's one in Germany and there's one in Spain and so there aren't many of these around and we're all of us are learning how to do that.
[00:25:17] Dallas Campbell: And do you all talk to each other? Is there a degree of competition?
[00:25:20] Jeremy Hadall: There's a bit of competition, but there's also a bit of collaboration going on between us. We're all learning how to do this and we're about, we're in the process of upgrading this facility with more complex dynamics in the robotics, more cameras, more tracking, all this kind of stuff. But yeah, ultimately, you would be able to come in here, you'd be able to simulate your mission completely. We have a control room upstairs where we can control this facility completely. It looks like a standard control room, that's what it's designed to look like. So yeah, you can control it from there, you can train your operators, you can understand how this stuff works and ultimately get to a stage where, from what we would term as a space technology, you're at TRL 6 and TRL 6 means you're in a representative environment and you're testing...
[00:25:57] Dallas Campbell: What's it called? TRL?
[00:25:59] Jeremy Hadall: Technology Readiness Levels. They came from the NASA, from the shuttle era and TRL 1 quite simply is, I've got an idea that I've written on the back of an envelope and TRL 9 is I'm launching space shuttles over and over again and TRL 6 is testing all of that in a representative environment. That's where this is aimed at, that also means we've got to validate how it's operated, and by who, so that's the aim for this whole facility.
[00:26:21] Dallas Campbell: And are you busy at the moment? I mean, have you got lots of people coming in testing stuff? I'm interested in kind of where we are with that. Are people sort of clambering to get in here to test stuff out?
[00:26:31] Jeremy Hadall: Yes, they are, yeah. We have a number of campaigns, we can't talk about all of them, but we've got a number of what we call...
[00:26:35] Dallas Campbell: Tell us the secret stuff.
[00:26:37] Jeremy Hadall: No, I can't because people like Elie will shout at me and then not come and use it. So we have lots of campaigns planned over the rest of this year and we're also, like I say, we're also upgrading the facility, so that makes it a very exciting time for us with lots of new technology coming in and, you know, if we come back in a year's time, it won't look like this.
[00:26:55] Dallas Campbell: What will it look like?
[00:26:55] Jeremy Hadall: Well, so to start with, very simply, the robots will be the other way around and we'll have, at the end of the room, I don't know if it's in shot, but there's a big light. We're going to be able to move that around. The aim of that is to simulate the sun as it affects sensors and comes around. So we'll be able to move that automatically.
[00:27:12] Dallas Campbell: Well, actually, that's interesting. So you've got a sun there. So basically, we're just, this is a kind of mini, we're just a mini solar system ish, sort of, but 25 meters long.
[00:27:21] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah but I mean, it is 25 meters long, that's tiny in space terms. We talk about coming close to a satellite and docking towards it that kind of technique starts at 110 kilometers away We've got 25-27 meters to play with so we do tend to scale things down in here quite a lot, but you still get the same approach.
[00:27:40] Dallas Campbell: You know, I think about when you break down in a car and you need the RAC, it's all quite simple. They come and stop and the man gets out and they get a spanner. Doing things in space, I'm assuming, is difficult given that things are moving very quickly and things behave very, differently as they do on Earth. So maybe we should talk about just the sort of challenges involved and, you know, when it comes to the physics of all of this.
[00:28:01] Dr. Elie Allouis: Yes, to just rebound on your RAC point. so we are expecting to build larger infrastructures in space. We're talking about antennas, maybe a hundred meters across, or maybe space based solar power to beam down power from space that will be like a kilometer across. What we can expect is probably hundreds of robotics agents working really hard to build this thing and I think there's one certainty we can have is that robotics will fail.
[00:28:29] Dallas Campbell: Surely not. There's one thing I've learned about new technologies, is at some point you have to turn it off and turn it on again.
[00:28:37] Dr. Elie Allouis: That might work, sometimes it doesn't. So what we're looking at is how we can actually make it economically viable and try to move away from building a big monolithic system but making things that can almost like repair themselves. So if we take, the example of a space factory, it's very likely that you'll have two manipulators. working in sync to build something and through some machine learning or AI limits, we can do predictive maintenance of these robotic systems and try to see that something is not quite right with one of these manipulators and the other manipulator will be able to actually remove a failing part, a failing robotic joint from the other one and replace it with a new one. So, that means that economically, you're not losing your whole system, and you can just bring spare parts and that really enables, that really changes the kind of the economics of building these large structures in pace, because you don't care so much about one element failing.
[00:29:34] Dallas Campbell: I mean, with the way you're talking, it does seem like it's going to be quite a radical step change in terms of the objects that are going to be in space from, you know, well, satellites will be getting smaller and cheaper to launch, but suddenly the idea that we can actually IKEA style build giant kilometer...
[00:29:50] Dr. Elie Allouis: Yeah, I think there's a lot of around these topics and again, it's all about addressing some sustainability elements, where a single platform can be shared with multiple payloads and you can actually swap them around over the course of their lifetime.
[00:30:04] Dallas Campbell: And when will we be able to move things around in space? These kind of robot arms, these manipulators, will we be able to sort of use them as sort of tow trucks and sort of move things to different orbits or change positions of things?
[00:30:15] Dr. Elie Allouis: Yes, there's an element of that, because once you have a need to get all these different feedstock and parts up to various orbits, we're very likely to see some sort of logistics, you know, between a lower orbit to a higher orbit and I think this is really anecosystem that's developing right now and at all stages between the logistics, the robotics, the AI, the control, all of that is actually maturing and are key building blocks to enable these visions.
[00:30:44] Dallas Campbell: I mean we're seeing, we've seen this great sort of revolution in how space has changed, really, the way that we do anything on planet Earth. I'm just imagining if we sort of fast forward ten years in the future, what kind of things we'll be seeing in space. Will we be seeing these large structures being able to be built, do you think, in ten years, or is that too optimistic? I'm trying to get a bit of a time frame in...
[00:31:05] Jeremy Hadall: I don't think that's optimistic at all. You know, right now, sitting on the ISS, there are two robot arms who have been carrying out simulated assembly tasks from a company called GitEye and the videos show them operating at 75 times speed just because nobody's got the time to sit there for the length of time it takes.
[00:31:21] Dallas Campbell: Somebody will, somebody will sit and watch that in real time.
[00:31:23] Jeremy Hadall: But the reality is, you know, that's there now and it might be very slow and it might not be absolutely finalized, it might not be the right things. But if we can do that now, on the space station, in ten years time, definitely we'll be building bigger structures, definitely we'll be servicing satellites and we might be doing garbage collection in space and recycling. I think that's probably a little bit further off, but definitely, that's coming.
[00:31:46] Dallas Campbell: I'm interested in where the UK was placed in all of this. A lot of people who aren't involved in the space industry, they see, they might see the odd Elon Musk Starship launch and that's kind of where space is for them, but where does the UK sit in all of this and where are we placed, do you think?
[00:32:02] Azmat Hossain: I think the UK is a very great place, in terms of space, the things that's happening in UK is a very close collaboration between researchers, academics, and industrial people. So everyone is working together very closely and we have these great centers, like Satellite Applications Catapult and also there are other centers, similar centers, who are working with each other and that's very critical in terms of creating these new technologies and helping larger companies, also smaller companies like ourselves, who have, like, ideas and how to test these ideas, how to build them and place them on space for real world applications. So I think that sort of ecosystem the UK is developing and I can't compare between different countries, but I think overall the UK is doing really well in this and hopefully that we will be doing much more.
[00:32:51] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. Jeremy, are you excited about where the UK is at the moment?
[00:32:54] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, I am. I think we've got some really unique capabilities, we've got some really good robotics capabilities, not necessarily in the space industry, but we're very used to putting robots in difficult and challenging places.
[00:33:05] Dallas Campbell: Are you reaching out to other bits of, you know, the robotics world and saying, well come and talk to us and can we borrow this and...
[00:33:11] Jeremy Hadall: Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, we've got really good expertise in putting robots into nuclear power plants, which are very challenging places, you're never going back to see that robot again, the same with the offshore industry. So those industries are very relevant and interesting, and we're talking to those and then we've got a lot of big companies like Airbus and also smaller startups and SMEs like Extend in the ecosystem and we've all got this vision of this is a commercial opportunity for the UK. I say yeah, it's really exciting and it's space and it's robots. You know, space is cool, robots are cool.
[00:33:46] Dallas Campbell: And it pays for itself, presumably. I mean, that's the thing, is that ultimately, presumably, all this comes down to things being commercially viable and this is obviously, well, am I right in thinking this is a way to make, to really open up space and make it really commercially viable?
[00:34:00] Jeremy Hadall: Yes and that's the key thing about this is space is becoming a commercial enterprise. It's no longer just about the exploration and understanding what's out there. It's about how do we use those resources? How do we use those resources sustainably, but how do we also make money out of it, essentially, how is it a commercial opportunity for us? And the UK is well placed to do it and I think we're on the right path to really benefit.
[00:34:21] Dallas Campbell: Thank you so much, that was absolutely fascinating. Thank you and thank you for letting us into your mini solar system and thank you very much to...
[00:34:29] Jeremy Hadall: mani.
[00:34:29] Dallas Campbell: Mani. I knew I'd forget Mani's name, anyway, a pleasure, thank you very much, thank you.
That's it. I hope you enjoyed the episode. To keep up to date with our new series of In-Orbit, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and to find out a little bit more about how space is empowering industries in between episodes, you can visit the Catapult website or join them or myself on social media.