Backyard boffins beating Europe’s biggest
Spectre’s put together a great set of articles about Surrey Satellite Technology ltd. (SSTL). Get this, from a 2005 article: “A company formed by a small team of boffins in Guildford yesterday launched the first Galileo satellite, beating a rival consortium of three of Europe’s technology giants [Alcatel, EADS and Thales].
“SSTL expects to have a turnover of £30m this year, with pre-tax profits of around £1.5m. The company has grown by 25pc a year since it was spun out of Surrey University in 1985. The consortium, Galileo Industries, originally tendered at five times the price quoted by SSTL, but their satellite is still in testing and not expected to launch until mid-2006.”
“We specifically make low-cost and quick satellites,” he said. Giove-A, which weighs 600kg, has gone
from drawing board to launch in 30 months. “We take these components out of iPods and so on, and work out whether we can fly them in our spacecraft.” Sir Martin said conventional components can take up to 15 years to test, by which time they may be obsolete. “Imagine if you bought a PC that was 15 years old.”
The best thing about this: Surrey University owns 80% of the company (the rest is owned by the employees, and by Elon Musk, a name that should be familiar to anyone in the dotcom scene). So they held 80% of a very profitable company growing 20-25% y/y that makes its living stripping bits out of your gadgets to make ultra cheap, ultralight satellites - in a country with no real culture or history of space exploitation/exploration - in fact, SSTL was formed just when Maggie Thatcher nabbed the entire UK space budget! Surrey University really cashed recently when it sold SSTL to EADS earlier this year.
I don’t think we in the UK realise just how much potential we have locked up in our universities, waiting to be exploited and to take on commercial giants from way out leftfield.
Stanford owns the patent to Google’s search engine technology. Would tuition fees faced by students be so onerous if UK universities were doing the same with their bright stars?
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