Space innovation
Publication : June 2023.
After a day spent meeting space-sector companies at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget, this article takes stock of current trends. Launch offerings, satellites, probes, payloads, and applications — all are adapting to unprecedented market conditions. Yet customer expectations have hardly changed since the early commercial successes of the major historical players, notably the need to jointly optimize reliability and launch lead times — goals long and wrongly assumed to be incompatible and condemned to endless trade-offs. The strategies of industry players have recently pivoted to meet them. The major novelty is the launch cadence — on the order of 100 per year for top performers (SpaceX and China). The story of a mutation long in the making, catalysed by the rapid and contagious adoption of a product-driven approach and a long-run production logic.
Inversion
Historically, components sent into space were behind the state of the art, because they had to be extensively and lengthily proven before facing the ordeals of launch and the extreme conditions of interstellar vacuum. That's how rustic microprocessors went up instead of the latest, more powerful models, in order to honor the precautionary principle.
Embedded AI at Thalès
At Le Bourget this year, it is clear that the space industry has flipped the paradigm. Just walk through Thales's innovation showcase, for example, to see that not only is AI nothing new but it is already integrated into embedded modules. These are AIs with high operational and decision-making autonomy, capable of adapting to extreme operational conditions. They can, for example, assist a radar to optimize its use.
Quantum effect in inertial navigation systems
Likewise, quantum effects are being tamed in latest-generation inertial navigation systems, which solve the autonomous geolocation problem. Vehicles that do not wish to — or cannot — connect to the GPS network or its equivalent have no choice but to fall back on dead reckoning: starting from a known point, they continuously measure the rotations and accelerations they undergo to deduce their progress, and thus their position. Historically, this measurement relied on gyroscopes and accelerometers. The former are a kind of top spinning very fast; their inertia keeps them pointing in the same direction, providing a reference against which the vehicle's heading forms a measurable angle. The latter capture acceleration data along 3 axes, which once integrated into velocity and distance, complement the heading information to generate a position. These devices have a flaw: they drift. Less and less so, admittedly, thanks to progress over the years through laser technologies or MEMS (silicon etching). But they are being made obsolete by quantum-effect navigation systems whose drift is far lower, solving the recalibration problem.
Why such an inversion ? And why now ?
Most likely for the same reason that has driven most sectors to reinvent themselves at forced march for the past quarter century: easy and affordable access to a wealth of information via the web, creating an ever-growing volume of disruption opportunities. But like the nuclear industry, space for a time continued to favour a craft-based, case-by-case approach, framed by standards and customs unconducive to unleashing managerial — and even technological, as we have just seen — creativity. Under the impetus of a few, the picture has changed. By doing business with NASA, Elon Musk not only helps save the old lady but also grants himself privileged access to the memory of American space. The institution's cabinets and databases are overflowing with projects, ideas, and reports on failures and successes. Carefully examining this trove of information in light of today's knowledge is an unprecedented opportunity to revive bold initiatives successfully, saving enormous amounts of time. And if, on top of that — as is the case — a resolutely industrial management approach is grafted onto this dynamic, you get SpaceX and, by mimicry, the Chinese space industry.
The strategists' fight
The acceleration of innovation in the space sector widens the gaps between players running very different game plans. The main fault line lies in the choice of industrial strategy. Some, still few in number, believe in a serial-production logic — that is, a product-driven approach paired with customer service drawing its cues from sectors deemed (wrongly) more "classical," such as automotive. Others hold that space is, and must remain, the domain of exception — the preserve of a handpicked few, in a logic of customization and low volumes.
The OHB case : open and frugal innovation
At the same time, the range of offerings is broadening. OHB, for example — a German company that has kept the startup spirit of its early days despite hypergrowth — has moved from being a specialist in observation satellites to a versatile player present in heavy and light launchers, in every type of satellite including microsatellites, simultaneously as a manufacturer, operator, and service provider (notably with software offerings in the field of space applications targeting businesses and even the general public). It has resolutely adopted serial-production thinking to optimize the cost of its launchers, while practising open and frugal innovation: modified beer tanks cost 10 times less than their space-dedicated predecessors, and repurposed BMW airbag connectors advantageously replace micropump connectors (in this case, cost is divided by 1,000).
Eco-design and the zero-debris charter
This dynamic and the strategic divides between the old guard and the moderns are fuelled by enormous growth prospects. The budgets of major institutional buyers and private customers alike are literally exploding. Accordingly, to avoid turning space into a trash heap, its industrialization must comply with eco-design principles — the best known being the deorbiting capability: a spacecraft must carry enough fuel to push itself back into the atmosphere and burn up there at its end of life. Space robots will one day handle the deorbiting of space objects lacking such capability, gripping them with a teleoperated arm, for example. The zero-debris charter is one of the major topics at the show — in conferences and panels as well as in smaller settings over a drink. It is even becoming an argument against the development of microsatellite constellations, whose polluting potential is proportional to their promoters' ambitions.
Space and sustainable development
Space plays a key role in observing the Earth and its phenomena — climate change first and foremost. A highly innovative project, the European Space Agency's DTE (for Digital Twin Earth), aims to complement its Copernicus space-observation system by connecting it to a digital replica of our planet leveraging artificial intelligence technologies — capable of simulating its evolution in the past and the future, and forecasting as early as possible the impact of our decisions and the occurrence of natural disasters. CERN is partnering with ESA to multiply DTE's capabilities through the use of quantum computing.