 So basically the idea of this talk is to kind of inspire you guys in to think of ways that you can get involved in a space industry because it's actually much more accessible than you think The image it tends to have is it's all massive geostation re-communication satellites and really complex space telescopes and it is but it's also a lot more than that So I'm gonna kind of talk about the two threads that I talked to get into my career One of which is very very traditional. It's the degree into job thread But the other one is this is very much the opposite and that is will become clear So I am a spacecraft electronics and systems engineer at STFC rail space We are one of the government's national labs building effectively science instruments for space research I am also the lead pocket cube engineer at a small group of amateurs called the flame trench And I'll get into more about that as well And I have a bunch of other hats and we'll touch on some of those throughout the talk So for people I assume most of you don't know the space industry So it's actually growing like never before and there's money flowing into it from everywhere governments are throwing money in it's Not just government, but it's also businesses and universities and research institutions and high schools and Charities and every type of organization and individual what you can imagine is actually investing and doing things in the space And so if you think about just governments, we call that all space This is like the 60s and 70s in the Apollo era. We don't do that anymore. We have Commercial entities and all kinds of things going on and we call this new space, which is where all the money is And the result of that is there's actually never been a better time to get involved in a space sector And there's so much opportunity to do really interesting things and the technologies is getting to the point where we can do Really incredible things and I'll touch on that in a bit So I actually did not come from an aerospace backgrounds. I came loosely from an aerospace background but actually mostly as a maker My dad ran a rapid prototyping and Industrial modeling company and I grew up learning to build things in my house And I tried to take that through all of my schooling basically and I did every subject That would get me into a workshop for about six years straight at school And that was all I wanted to do for basically my entire school career So I did the whole standard Computer computer drawings. We learned some prototyping. I started building some stuff with simple arduinos That evolved into some internet of things type stuff with when the Arduino young came out if anyone's familiar with that That's like a Wi-Fi connected Arduino, and I did a Amazon linked project with that I actually got very lucky because my the school I went to had lots of access to stuff most maker spaces Hopefully have and I kind of had a lot of experience of all different kinds of making things out of a very young age And I took that forward, but actually what I wanted to do was Learn how to make things that did things. I wasn't from it like happy with just Making something in my hands. I wanted to make something that did something useful And so I did a degree in electronic engineering and computer science because I didn't want to make it too easy And this was a really easy progression from what I'd been doing I've been playing with arduinos and I've been playing with simple microcontroller projects And this was a progression into doing some more complicated things and hopefully combining that with the skills I've learned by making things and doing something more and Turns out that pairing is to computer science is really useful because most things are embedded systems being able to program these and Design them in the first place is incredibly valuable and I found that really useful going forward And actually it turns out that when we look at CubeSats later on this is Really really useful because this type of satellite is about 80% embedded systems and nothing else So actually I really wasn't that interested in space. I Grew I like I knew it existed, but it was I had no intention of working in it I didn't really know what I wanted to do for a living and then in December 2014. I watched this happened live Oh five three two one and with us at dawn In a new era of American space exploration I could see a private opening the scene of the sound I'm not 31 seconds in When you can control on the first stage 40 seconds 50 seconds in Still looking good. I'm not fun. Two minutes Two minutes in the fall What are the stronger boosters that change the package and the whole pack? Right, I haven't got the entire launch because it's about 11 minutes, but I cut that before the booters came off. But that's the gravity of some of what this stuff is. And actually, this was the first flight of NASA's new crew capsule. That was the first thing that said to me that actually, there's a new push in the space industry going on and I want to be a part of that. Because a few years before this happens, the space shuttle was grounded and it never flew again. And it was a rule where we were sending astronauts to space, to the space station on the Soyuz spacecraft. But that's kind of not really in the public eye at all. And the space industry as a whole wasn't really in the public eye. And when this flew, this was really the first sign that there was something else going on that someone my age could be a part of. And something more than my parents would have seen in the 60s. Like that level of push to have a new space industry. So at the time, this was also the most powerful rocket flying. This of course has had its record smashed by the Falcon Heavy. If anyone saw that launch, this has gone up, I think, gone twice this year so far. And yeah, so my actual first contact in the space industry, if you pardon the pun, was in my second year of uni. And we went to a hackathon at the Riverford Appleton Lab in Harwell. And that's called the Act in Space Hackathon. And it's sponsored by the European Space Agency and multiple other aerospace companies. And basically the idea is you get a set list of topics from multiple aerospace companies. And they say to you, use space technology to solve a related problem to one of these topics. And we went and had a team and we tried to develop a company to launch autonomous glider systems. And the idea would be you could do research in the atmosphere by sending up a glider on a helium balloon. But instead of having to chase it halfway across the country to get your data back, it would fly back to where you were. And it would all be very safe. And you'd be able to make sure it didn't fly across airports or rocket launches as the way we started was. And this was all supported by the Subbusiness Incubation Center and they actually work in Harwell. And they are effectively a startup incubator. And they will, if you have an idea in the space industry, they will support you and give you funding and office space to develop that further. And there's been quite a few very successful companies that have come out of our program. Unfortunately, we were not one of them. Not only did we not win the hackathon, but the legal side of this was awful. Do not try to fly autonomous drones in the UK. You'll have a headache. And unless you know several lawyers, it's really not worth the problems. But this was our original idea of, from my aviation background and some of the embedded stuff I've been working in, was this the way I was going to find something to work on in the space industry? Actually, no, it wasn't. But in my third year, I went to go back to rail space. And I did a placement year. And I was working on instrumentation that's currently flying on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. And that is in space between the Earth and the Sun. And it's constantly looking at the edge of the Sun. We want to study the heliosphere, which is like the outer layer of the Sun's atmosphere. That's the spacecraft there. We see the four instruments there. Those are four telescopes. We built the electronics for each one of those remote sensing instruments. And basically, I was working on different ways that we could improve that front-end technology these big camera sensors. So if you haven't seen a space instrument before, that's what one looks like. This box is a big box of electronics that controls the camera sensor. This is a cryostat that holds the sensor at about minus 60 degrees centigrade. And the reason we do that is because we need a really, really, really low read lawyers on the sensor. And actually, most of the noise is thermal until you get down to about minus 60. So we have to chill it right down in a vacuum or the sensor is unusable. So this is the actual camera sensor here, this little rectangle. So think about the one that's on your phone. It's about a millimeter square. This one is about five by three inches, if you will take. And most science-grade CCDs are about that size. So you can kind of get an appreciation of the size and the quality of the instrument. And if you've ever seen a picture like this, well, that's what that camera takes. I don't know what spectrum that's in. I think there's a few different wavelengths that those instruments take. So the goal of my placement was to look at ways of improving space telescope technology. And one of the reasons is because space telescopes that have, well, they're very limited, they build a lot of problems. The first one is they're very, very unserviceable. Once you've launched a space telescope, you can't go back to it. You can't fix problems with it, especially now that the space shuttle's gone. And the Hubble was actually the exception and not the rule. So for the most part, if you have a science mission that goes wrong, you're stuffed, you can't do anything, you've just wasted $200 million. They're very expensive, $200 million. Doing stuff in space is infinitely harder than doing stuff on the ground. And you have to pay for that. Unfortunately, there's no other way around it. They're permanently specialized. So a ground-based telescope, you can swap instruments out, you can do multiple different science experiments with it. A space-based telescope, you can't. You launch it with two instruments and it does a very specific thing and that's all it's ever gonna do. You can't change our instrument, you can't change the science goals. That's set right from the start of the design process and you never go back to it. It's also very power limited. Most telescopes get all their power from the sun. This isn't exactly the most efficient way of doing it that we've managed so far, but really we have to be very careful with the amount of computing power that we can send up onto these telescopes because, well, there's just not that much power going around. And if you're in a vacuum, you have to get rid of all the heat that that produces. And that's actually very, very difficult and something we have to look at very carefully in the space industry because heat doesn't leave spacecraft in the normal way. There's no convection, you have to radiate it all out and actually even the smallest electronics get extremely hot in space because you just can't dump the heat quick enough. But the biggest one is that space telescopes are mass and volume limited. You have obviously a certain amount of weight that you can send somewhere with a given rocket and will the bigger the telescope, the less places you can send it to, and some missions you want to send to pretty exotic locations beyond the moon, for instance. The volume issue is starting to come to a head with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is this one here. So this is the, I think, 14 mirrors, the JWST folded up in the rocket fairing for launch. If you saw the news, they just finished building this. Well, they're mated the two halves of it in preparation for final testing and launch. But really, this is not ideal at all. The launch process for this telescope takes about a month to finish. There's that many moving parts that have to unfold in exactly the right sequence, in exactly the right way that this telescope will ever work. If any of those go wrong, the mission is dead. To put this into a bit of context, this is a $10 billion telescope, $10 billion. So it's certainly cost about four and a half billion to put that into context. So I know most people in the space industry are going to be very, very drunk when this launches, because if this goes wrong, it's about 30 years of work up and about. So effectively, we want to solve this problem and we can't do it with bigger rockets because they don't exist. This is a render of SpaceX's BFR system before they changed it again. And if we could launch a 12 meter big telescope in one chunk, we would. But the rocket doesn't exist, so we can't. So how do we build better telescopes with the volume that we have given to us? And this is the most technical slide in the presentation, by the way. So if anyone loses me here, don't worry. There are basically two technologies that I was researching during my placement year. And the first one is called Digital Correlated Double Sampling. And basically what that means is current technology uses analog electronics to sample the waveform coming off of the camera sensor. So all of the pixel data comes off as an analog signal. You can sample that over time with analog electronics and then read that out and process it later. The easier way, well, not easier way, but the better way of doing it is to do all that digitally. We do what's called oversampling, where we take multiple really fast samples of that analog waveform and then we basically reconstruct it on an FPGA. And that allows us to do lots of really clever processing to both reduce the noise but also reduce the power consumed in the instrument. And that's important because that allows us to build what's called an integrated focal plane. And effectively what this means is you've got all of your camera sensors here and you've got your electronics mounted in a block behind it. And the low power that you get from implementing this means that you get to put these right next to the camera sensors and it won't affect the thermal stability of them that much. And that means that we get really, really low noise instruments that can be built really compactly. And the benefit of that is we get to take all of these little tiles and we get to stack them. And the result of that is you get really, really, really big camera sensors and to give like an idea of the scale of these, the ESA have a mission called GAIA in space at the moment. GAIA is an astronomical mission. It's basically measuring the position and location of stars in the sky. And the focal plane for that is about this size. It's about a meter by half a meter and that's just the camera sensor. There's also a mission which is I think it's a ground-based telescope called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. The size of the digital camera for that is about as tall as I am. The focal plane is about this sort of size, circular. Or if you compare that to the one in your phone, it's a pretty big scale up. So I now work again at Rousebase. I'm a graduate engineer there and effectively I do the same job as I did two years ago. So a bit of context, we are the one of the seven research councils in the UK which means we are the public funded research body. The Science and Technology Facilities Council which is kind of the organization that Rousebase comes under. Effectively, we provide science facilities and other capabilities for academia, for industry and for our own research. Examples of that are things like we have the ISIS Neutron and Muon source which does materials research and things like electronics and radiation research. The Central Laser Facility which has the most powerful laser on the planet. The Vulcan Petawatt laser. And we also do things like scientific computing. We've got lots of supercomputers. We support experiments like CERN, we support our own particle accelerator experiments and we do things like astronomy research that require lots of computing power. We have been involved in over 210 space missions. Notable ones include things like the Huygens lander which went with Cassini landed on Saturn's moon Titan. We built a sensor package on that. We've done multiple solar physics experiments. We're on most of the solar observation satellites that are in space at the moment. So right now I'm working on calibration tech for infrared instruments. So most of these are for Earth observation for studying our climate. And basically we wanna have extremely well-calibrated instruments to be able to take any science that's worth anything. The problem is infrared instruments, you can't calibrate on the ground and when it's launched them because they drift. So we have to have a way of calibrating them in space. And the way we do that is basically a metal bucket covered in Vanser black on the inside. And that has the property of emitting almost zero visible light which means all of the light it emits is infrared which is its temperature. And if we can measure the temperature of it really accurately without actually affecting the temperature then we can calibrate the sensor really, really, really well. And actually, so I've been building electronics that can measure the temperature of this this calibration system to about three micro kelvin so three millionths of a degree without changing the temperature of the target. And I'm about to start literally on Monday when I get into work on working on Mrs. Issa's Lagrange mission. So this is going to go, if you imagine the earth and the sun, there's space between it and then you go off to the side a bit and we're gonna put that over there. And the idea is to watch the solar winds travel from the sun towards the earth and that tells us a lot about the space weather about how that affects the earth and its magnetosphere. It lets us study the properties of the sun's atmosphere. So we've got two instruments on that and we're building camera tech for both of those. So that's kind of the traditional route that I've had into the industry. And before I get into the non-traditional side of that I kind of need to go into CubeSats which are a type of nanosatellite which is what they're called which is you could hold in the palm of your hand basically and the technology for these is really incredible. And it's only ever been possible since microelectronics really developed and became mature. So because these are about 10 centimeters big you could hold one in your hand. The universities have one U CubeSats which is just a 10 by 10 centimeter cube and they build hundreds of these. They're really popular for students for education needs and for amateurs. So they're used a lot for universities and for teaching students. They're used a lot for companies for doing technology demonstration and things like that. Amateurs use them a lot. Most amateur radio satellites are one U CubeSats and while the technology for these is only getting better actually the opportunities are really cool here. So for its context this is a six U CubeSat made by Planetary Resources and this one is looking at asteroids and the idea is to find out how much water is on asteroids that are near the Earth and the idea behind that is if you know which ones have water you can go and get it. And it turns out water is actually really, really valuable for space especially if you wanna develop an economy in space because it's not only rocket fuel but it's also water and oxygen for potential crewed missions. So back in my degree in my final year we tried to build one. This is a two and a half U CubeSat and effectively the idea was to try and build like a ground-based analog. So to do that I effectively tried to teach myself space systems engineering and try to work out how to make radio modules, power modules, computers or talk to each other and to try and at least get there and function as a real CubeSat. So we had four people in eight months trying to build one of these and we got reasonably successful and the idea is you need to try and mirror a lot of what the American colleges are doing and most American colleges have CubeSat teams now and to try and start something off in this country that mirrors what the Americans are doing and I think there's two or three universities that do do it here but it's by no means as common as over in the US. And effectively what I did in terms of as well as getting four of these modules talking to each other but also getting solar data so the idea was you've got six solar panels all around the edges here and if you know the current coming off each one of these panels you can do some clever maths and work out where the sun is and that's actually really valuable because there's no other way to tell which way you're pointing when you're in space not without really big cameras and stuff to try and work out where stars are. So a bit off from that so this is, the Plum French is kind of a group of amateurs that I've been involved in for a while and really this proves the value of networking on Twitter because I met all of these people on Twitter. There's 12 of us, pretty much even this split between the UK and the US and like me they are also, well they were students many of them are engineers, some of them are scientists the programmers, teachers, pilots there's a couple of paramedics there's at least one scientific communicator there's a filmmaker, a couple of musicians it's quite a diverse mix and we kind of ended up in a group chat and we decided to make a website to sort of show what we were building ourselves and use it as like a portfolio website, so to speak and what it kind of grew and now we have a couple of pretty major projects going on and I thought I'd share a couple of those so you can find us here and here and we also crowdfund on here and we've got two major projects one of which is a pocket cube satellite which is effectively a CubeSat but smaller so a CubeSat is a 10 by 10 centimeter cube a pocket cube is five by five centimeters cubed but ideally no less capable than a CubeSat and Gaze is out of the project and we are trying to build a robotic observatory for astrophotography so this is our CubeSat or pocket cube, five centimeters we don't have a launch date so to speak but it's soon and we will be open sourcing it when we know it works we don't feel there's much value in dropping everything we have immediately into open source but we think if there's a proven platform here it's really valuable to amateurs and makers and other things like that and so we'll be making that available directly so actually these types of spacecraft, these nanosatellites are really really good for amateurs to get involved because not only does it cost well 50,000 pounds to fly one which is absurdly cheap in the space industry but you can just communicate with them and if you've got an amateur radio license you can transmit up to one but actually you don't have to have anything to be able to receive signals from one and there's all kinds of networks and ground stations that you can have to decode transmissions coming down from spacecraft of which Satnogs is a great one and I think Joey's going to do a big talk later about things like Satnogs so we are only crowdfunding us this is an amateur effort and we're getting there, prototyping so to give you an idea of the scale of this this is the base plate of one of our structural models so that's our five centimeter base plate that's been machined from aluminium and then I also have one of the solar panels so this is one of our structural solar panel models so this is, it's really small but it's no less capable than one of those of our CubeSats those bigger ones the caveat is the power of this thing has to work is excruciatingly low over an entire orbit of 90 minutes there's an average power coming in of 190 milliwatts so you wouldn't have much to work with, it's quite tight so we have a bit of a different design to a lot of other CubeSats if you look at pictures online there's a big stack of internal electronics and there you cover things like the radio the power systems they've got the batteries in there all the, any payload you might have all the central computing are all in this internal stack the problem with that is if you do that you don't really have any room for payload so what we did is we took all of those electronics in the middle and we put them on the inside of the solar panels so we have this big five panel rigid flex PCB which kind of unfolds into like a big cross and the idea is all of the spacecrafts platform electronics are on that big PCB and what that leaves is this big red area which is free for payload which is we think pretty unique for a satellite of this size and so we're thinking well what can we do how do we use this payload because we haven't got time to build a payload we've got to get the rest of this working so we want to do a student competition to go to engineering students in the UK and the US through the UK SEDS and SEDS USA organizations and ask students to submit proposals to fly their own payloads in space for what we think is a very, very cheap opportunity and the idea is we will choose one to two and give them support to build their own payload to test their own experiments and give them support over the next two years to fly that and we really can't afford to launch this thing so the other project is this observatory and this kind of stems from we kind of realized that there aren't really many online ways of doing astrophotography you either have to drop 6,000 pounds on a really, really expensive setup or you have to pay excruciating amounts to subscribe to someone's observatory online and we were like well that's not very good we can do better so we are starting to build this two telescope setup the first one is on our discord here so we've got like a discord bot setup and if you don't know discord it's like an online messaging service and we've kind of got this little community going on discord lots of people like students or engineers or other makers and there's actually a nice exchange of knowledge going on because not only do we share what we're working on but they get to share what they're working on and if we have problems or they have problems there's a nice exchange of knowledge there so the first one is using this telescope this orange tube here that's a Celestron 6 SE and that's decent for planetary stuff and we're gonna get that setup to do sort of not live streaming but very quick and easy to access photography the second one we're getting is a Newtonian and it's a lot higher quality and we hope to be able to get pictures of this sort of level in planetary and particularly in deep sky and we'll be wanting to get into citizen science and we wanna try we think we can do spectrometry and we think we can do photometry with a telescope of this quality so if you don't know spectrometry is study of spectra so you could point it at something and see what it's made of effectively photometry is looking at the brightness of stars and through doing that you can find things like exoplanets when the brightness dips and if you observe it enough you start seeing a pattern and that tells you about some things in orbit around that star and there's lots of really interesting science you can do that and the other thing is outreach this is really really valuable we've had a couple of people ask us already can we use this for the student outreach and our answer is well we haven't finished it yet so as soon as this is done this will be a really really really cool opportunity for teachers to log in and be able to point this at anything in the sky so that's a bit about what I've been working on I wanna extend the opportunities for like nanosaps in general and try and show you some things that you can do with these so these are quite new technologies people don't really know the limits of what they're capable of but the technology is progressing really really quickly microelectronics are kind of a known quantity now but none of this stuff has really been proven in space so there's an awful lot of firsts happening at the moment but there's still so many ways for amateurs to get involved and there's loads and loads of amateur satellites doing some really interesting things at the moment so this is a pretty early amateur cube set this is done by Amesat UK and so basically it's just got a really easy to decode a transmitter on it and the idea is that students can receive the signals and decode it and it has got a little science experiment that people can pull data from and I think this is still an orbit I'm not sure if this is still going I think it is but there's a whole bunch of that and there's a bit more complex stuff that you can do so this is light sail 2 and it was developed by the Planetary Society it is a sequel to light sail 1 which was equally successful as this one and the Planetary Society is effectively an amateur organisation they lobby in the US and they effectively are an outreach organisation they're not for profit but they built this free U-Cube set here to demonstrate solar sailing so this is about this sort of science it's about a foot long and that was deployed by a student who built small satellites called Prox One and at the moment right now it's demonstrating solar sailing you know, with orbit and it has very, very, very it's done very well demonstrating orbit raising technologies without using any power and actually you can see it's alive now this isn't a it's not a particularly good link but if you google light sail mission control you can see all of the live data coming from that and it's actually really cool to see it alive and there is more stuff coming in the future so we think that nanosatellites are perfectly viable in deep space and we don't believe that you have to spend half a billion dollars to go and do planetary science so most of this boils down to is the communications and propulsion technology there and the answer is it's getting there and well we've just proven out some really new technology with this one so this is a NASA Cube set this is called Marko it's a 6U Cube set so it sizes the Planetary Society one again and this flew past Mars it was launched with NASA's Insight Lander and when Insight dropped through the atmosphere and landed Marko, there was two of them acted as radio relays back to Earth so we got live data from the entry descent and landing sequence of the Insight Lander the European Space Agency are doing something similar so this is a 12U Cube set so it's this one doubled again and they want to fly this satellite from a escape trajectory from Earth all the way to an asteroid under its own power and this is a Cube set this big and it's going about 40 million kilometers away to go and explore an asteroid and there's actually loads more Cube sets going in and around the moon so NASA are launching multiple SLS flights in the next four to ten years and there are lots and lots of students and other companies and organizations that are already booked on and building Cube sets to go and fly often around the moon either for science or for education purposes or anything like that so the summary is well there's really no better time to do this you get into it right now it's growing so fast there's so much money in it there's so many interesting things that you can do and this reason is because of the cost of orbit is going down so if people have been following SpaceX at all they've started landing and reusing rockets and this is the main factor that is starting to get launched much much lower than it was before we're not quite there yet that's a bit a few years off but prices like $5,000 per kilogram are very very good and happening right now and as this drops that means there's more entries more people can get into the industry and can do really cool things and there's even companies doing their own small set launch vehicles that can, so you don't have to ride along with a multi-million dollar science instrument you can go exactly where you want to go and most of this is because well these applications are super valuable if anyone's have a Google NASA spin-off technology that will tell you everything you need to know but even now there's much more new technology coming from CubeSats so an example of that is something like Planet Labs they've developed the Dove CubeSat and they've got about 300 of those in orbit right now there are three new CubeSats so that's big and they can photograph every square mile on the Earth once every 24 hours and that's very valuable for a lot of science purposes and other things and really eight years ago this sort of thing was unheard of no one would have thought you could launch a 300 CubeSat constellation but here we are and so really just get involved and I wouldn't want to not practice what I'm preaching so I started a company to look at developing solutions to send CubeSats into deep space and to do extra, extra science because mostly CubeSats aren't normally the platform you'd use to do really advanced science missions but actually I think there can be and we're going to explore some of the solutions that we can come up with to try to do a science and other things but not around the Earth and a lot of what I've talked about is quite technical but if you're not technical there's still lots of things you can do to get involved so there are things called NASA socials which basically NASA have you over to one of their bases for two or three days and you go and watch a launch and they tell you all about the mission and what it's doing and then you get to go off to the launch pad and watch it go off East Open days are another good one there's another one in on the 6th of October in the Netherlands they open at least one of their sensors every year and those are really good to go and visit and see what's going on for most of these you have to apply online especially for the NASA ones they're not always open to international people but many of them are and they will take anyone who has any kind of unique following and I imagine many of you guys have a very unique social media following so you don't have to have thousands and thousands of thousands of followers they take lots of small people but the idea is that you help NASA always connect what they're doing with people who wouldn't normally see it and I think that's very very valuable so really do take this it's so good if seeing a rocket launch is kind of like a once in a lifetime thing and so I went in April this year and we went to see a Northrop-German Cygnus mission which is resupplying the International Space Station there's a picture of us with the next rocket in that series and that's because the first one was already on the pad and they let you into the hangar you can go right up close to it take lots of pictures and the scale of it is it's awe-inspiring so for those of you who follow me on Twitter I did promise a second rocket launch in this slide so I'm going to leave you with the rocket launch video that we took in April from two miles away in NASA Wallops in Virginia which is the closest you can get to any rocket launch in the Western world this is in half speed slow motion this is actually what it feels like, by the way, you can really feel it that's it, thank you very much