By Will Goodbody, Science & Technology Correspondent
It’s not everyday that a new spacecraft is born. But this Wednesday is one of them.
Around 1pm Irish time (weather and technicalities permitting) the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle or IXV, will blast off on a Vega rocket from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana.
Its near two hour mission is straightforward. In basic terms, IXV is the prototype for the first spacecraft to be built in Europe that can not only travel into space, but also make it back again without burning up on re-entry.
Russia, the U.S., India, China, Japan and even private companies like SpaceX either had, have or nearly have the technology to successfully batter through the Earth’s atmosphere and back to solid ground. But Europe – with its rich history of discovery and science – has never mastered the feat.
That’s a situation which must change if the continent, through the European Space Agency (ESA) and its constituent members, wishes to fulfil its ambitions to send robotic missions on round trips to near Earth orbit, and further again to asteroids and even Mars. And more importantly to do the same with humans on board.
Enter IXV. It will test new materials designed to cope with the 1,800 degrees Celcius of temperature generated during the violence of re-entry. It will try out new guidance and navigation technology. And the craft, which doesn’t look dissimilar to a scaled down squashed space shuttle, will also put a new flat bottomed wingless design through its paces.
Watch an interactive video about IXV here
Of course much could go wrong. If even a small piece of the new heat shield fails during re-entry, or the new rear flaps don’t work as they should, it could spell curtains for the unmanned mission. But ultimately primary contractor, Thales Alenia Space Italia, and the 40 companies around Europe that have also fed meticulously into the mission over many years, will be hoping and anticipating that it won’t.
One of those companies is based in a modest office block in Clonskeagh in Dublin. In 2011 the global engineering firm Curtiss-Wright bought ACRA Control, an Irish data acquisition systems and networks company founded two decades earlier, for €42 million.
A year later the company won a contract worth $3 million from ESA to design the systems which would gather the deluge of data generated from the more than 300 sensors on board IXV during its short maiden voyage, transmit some of it mid-flight to ground stations along the route and store the rest robustly and securely until the craft is safely back on Earth.
This Wednesday, that technology developed in an office in Dublin, will not only blast into space and hopefully travel back again, but will also collect the information that scientists and engineers on the ground will depend upon to design Europe’s future space taxi.
The team at Curtiss-Wright Dublin will join the growing list of Irish based scientists and engineers that are not just bringing their technology to the world, but are sending it out of this world. Companies like Space Technology Ireland Ltd and Captec that had mission critical hardware and software aboard the hugely successful Rosetta comet probe and its plucky Philae lander.
SMEs like Cork based light detection company, SensL, which won a €300,000 contract from ESA in 2012 to develop sensor technology for future missions. And researchers like those in the software development centre Lero which just last month won a contract worth €400,000 to work on software for specialist space microchips.
Sure, competing for and winning contracts from the likes of ESA, NASA or any other space agency isn’t easy. There’s lots of red tape, form filling, etc. But there is support available from Enterprise Ireland and presumably from those brave adventurers who have already boldly gone where not a huge number have gone before.
And aside from the substantial financial rewards on offer (around 100 Irish companies have secured contracts worth around €100 million from ESA over the last decade or so), and the knowledge that can be gained from the wide collaboration on such a project, what could possibly look better on an individual or a company’s CV?
Like with everything to do with space exploration, when it comes to the potential benefits of getting involved in commercial space research, the sky’s no limit.
Will Goodbody will be reporting from the IXV launch in French Guiana for RTÉ News. You can stay up to date on the story, or comment on this blog, by following him on Twitter at @willgoodbody.