So what makes this facility so special is that it's a fully integrated
nanosatellite manufacturing facility. That means new parts come in the door
and fully flight-qualified satellites leave.
This helps us move faster as a
company and get things into space very quickly.
What this facility allows us to
do is focus just on our needs and build the test environment and send out the
door tested and qualified satellites.
Hi there, my name is Danny Bryce. I'll give you a tour around the satellite
design and manufacturing facility here
in Spire Glasgow. This area here is where we have our pre-production
engineering and qualification models. These are used for software and hardware
validation. They can be used by the global design teams and are accessible
anywhere. They also emulate the actual hardware that
we've got in orbit at the moment.
The satellites themselves are modular in design -
the modules are received into this area here where we inspect and electrically test
and conformity coat and make those ready for flight.
As flight stock, we can move those down stairs to build into satellites.
Since Spire's first LEMURs, we've gone through 16 batches and 16 iterations on
the design. Now that includes kind of three generational changes of the
payload which has increased our performance 10x.
Because we own the facility and have been able to tailor the facility for our
needs, it allows us to iterate much faster than if we were dependent on
external vendors for these services. We can crank out a design bring it to the
test facility see what works and doesn't and go back to the lab tweak the design
and immediately get back into the test facilities.
This is Spire's purpose-built cleanroom. We build and test all our own satellites in here.
Normal batch size is 8 satellites but we can build 10 a time.
Eight satellites generally takes a month. We've got sun simulator and thermal
testing in there. Once we're comfortable up with all the assembly testing then
we'll move along to environmental testing. First stage is thermal vacuum which
is performed in here - we have two satellites ready for test right now.
Following on from thermal vacuum testing is vibration test which is in this room here.
The final environmental test is RF, which we perform in our own anechoic chamber - down here.
This is Spire's own RF chamber. We use this to test and characterize the comms link
and the payload sensitivities. Having this capability on site along with
thermal vacuum and vibration testing cuts weeks out of the manufacturing cycle.
If someone brought us a new sensor tomorrow, depending on how large and complex it was...
for something a bit bigger it would be four to six months, but for something
small and easy as few as one or two. Having all these capabilities in-house
brings the time to make a satellite from months down to weeks.
We have thermal vacuum tests, thermal chambers, sun simulators, an RF chamber...
We have vibration test facilities, Helmholtz coils... anything that you need to test the
satellite we can do right here in-house.
EMC testing in house alone brings something that used to take us a week
down to only an hour. What this capability means for customers is that we can
improve our satellites more quickly which means they get better data and
more data faster.
It gives us a competitive advantage we can get our
designs from the design stage through qualification and into space much more
quickly. We go from design to in orbit in a matter of months.
It's an insane cycle that you can't do unless you control the entire process.
We built this facility in Scotland because Scotland has a local pool of talent
particularly in electronics engineering that we wanted to tap into.
People are surprised that there is such a world-class satellite production and
test facility right here in the middle of the city.
There really are no other facilities like this in the world