Surrey Satellite Technology’s success in securing the Galileo manufacturing contract along with German partner OHB marks the highest profile project the British company has yet worked on.
SatelliteFinance spoke to SSTL CEO Matt Perkins about Galileo and…
Surrey Satellite Technology’s success in securing the Galileo manufacturing contract along with German partner OHB marks the highest profile project the British company has yet worked on.
SatelliteFinance spoke to SSTL CEO Matt Perkins about Galileo and how it is merely one facet of a company that is looking to expand and diversify in a number of markets.
“We’re obviously thrilled with the Galileo contract,” he said. “The value to SSTL is somewhere in the region of E230m, although a lot of that will be redistributed to suppliers and sub-contractors throughout Europe.”
The irony surrounding the contract is that OHB and SSTL’s rival bidder is EADS Astrium, which acquired SSTL in 2008. Perkins said that the European Commission has established that there was no issue of Astrium’s ownership of SSTL posing a threat to fair competition in the Galileo bidding.
“As part of the sale process of SSTL the European Space Commission made a condition that details of the Galileo bidding process could not be passed to Astrium,” he said. “The very fact that the award has been made in the way it has demonstrates that a fair competition can be held, and we expect to compete in the same way for the other satellites. Astrium have been incredibly professional and handled it all in exactly the right way.”
SSTL was unaware that the first order would be for 14 satellites until the Commission made its announcement. Bidders were originally requested to provide quotes for order sizes of 8, 14 and 22 satellites, but the exact decision was unknown.
Perkins declared that Galileo would not dominate SSTL’s resources to the exclusion of its other business, and that it will not require heavy investment in new manpower. “We will be hiring more employees later in the year, but not a huge amount,” he said. “It’s difficult to put a number on how the resources will be allocated because that’s something that shifts with time, but this year, I would envisage that twenty to thirty people will be working full time on Galileo out of a total employee number of three hundred. That will change as time passes and the program is ramped up.”
The SSTL CEO acknowledged the challenges common to large constellation projects, as highlighted by the difficulties US and Russian manufacturers have faced in delivering satellites for the GPS and GLONASS navigations systems.
“We and OHB are very confident of delivering the satellites on time,” he said. “Obviously we have to have something that backs up the basis for this confidence, and for us that is GIOVE-A, which was delivered on time and recorded a longer lifespan than expected. We also delivered the RapidEye constellation on time, while OHB was equally successful in delivering the German reconnaissance system SAR-LUPE on schedule.”
