20 entrepreneurs A successful space odyssey
Sir Martin Sweeting OBE FRS is a man with big ambitions. Nearly 30 years ago, armed with just £100 and a team of four, he set up Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL), which designs, builds, launches and operates small satellites in orbit. Since its inception, Guildford-based SSTL has become the world’s leading small satellite company, with applications ranging from scientific research to communications to disaster monitoring. Sweeting talked to Eleanor Harris about his inspiration for the company, the importance of space to the UK economy and his plans to take business to the Moon
Sir Martin Sweeting OBE FRS is group executive chairman of SSTL and director of the Surrey Space Centre. He was born in London in 1951 and has a PhD in electronic engineering and communications. Sweeting pioneered the concept of small, low-cost and highly-capable satellites, and in 1981 he built and launched the UK’s first research microsatellite at the University of Surrey, using commercial off-the-shelf components. This was followed by a second satellite which launched in 1984.
In 1985 Sweeting formed SSTL as a spinout company from the University of Surrey. Today, SSTL employs 400 staff across four sites, has total export orders of £600 million, achieved turnover of £92 million for 2011, and has launched 36 satellites to date, including the international Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC). In 1995, Sweeting was awarded an OBE for his pioneering work in small satellites, in 2000 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2002 he was knighted for his services to the small satellite industry.
much to everybody’s surprise, it worked. NASA took up a second satellite that we built in just six months, and it’s still transmitting today, amazingly.
Can you tell me about the growth and success of SSTL?
What was your inspiration for SSTL?
It goes way, way back – when I was five or six, I was fascinated by communications, I would make telephones out of two cans and a bit of string. I then joined the army cadet force and became interested in amateur radio – this was in the 1960s, when the idea of being able to build radios and talk to people around the world was fascinating. At the same time, I watched the Moon landings and saw the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and those things all came together. As an undergraduate, when I probably should have been doing more work on my degree, I was playing with radios and tracking satellites. A few years after I finished my PhD, microcomputers came onto the consumer market and it struck me that you could actually build a small satellite using microelectronics in a university lab. At the time, that was considered pretty wacky to say the least, but I brought together a small group from the university and we begged and borrowed money and components from industry and over the next two years built our first satellite. I still don’t know quite why but NASA agreed to give it a piggy back ride on one of their rockets, and,
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After those two satellites, most people told me to go and get a proper job, but I formed SSTL in 1985 with just four people and £100. There wasn’t any government funding and the first 15 years were really difficult, trying to find every possible way to make the money go as far as possible. During the 1990s we worked with Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Chile and Singapore on experimental training satellites. It was a good business for us and the company grew slowly but gradually. But in the early 2000s we were able to very rapidly improve the performance of the satellites, by introducing the improvements in computers and cameras in the commercial marketplace. We could take pictures of the Earth with sufficient resolution to provide real operational solutions, such as disaster monitoring – we were one of the first organisations to provide images of Hurricane Katrina to the UN and the UN was using them to decide where to focus its relief efforts – but we also found that you could use these satellites for commercial purposes, such as agriculture, so we moved from being a research business into an operational business and our people grew. We formed a small subsidiary, DMCii, which turns the pictures from the satellites into things that the customer wants. We’re producing spacecraft that have real commercial applications, that are the size of a cupboard compared to the size of a London bus, and for a tenth of the price, and that’s changing the whole way that space can be used.
How does the company continue to grow?
In February we won a second contract with Galileo, Europe’s satellite navigation system, so with our
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – APRIL 2012
German partners we’re building all 22 satellites for that – when you think where we started, that’s pretty staggering. And we’re currently building satellites for Kazakhstan, Russia and Canada, and all of this is export, which is really great. Over our lifetime we have been independent of government funding, but there have been two key times when the government did support us with very small, but very key, bits of funding. One was in 2000, when Lord Sainsbury invested around £10m which allowed us to build the first of the disaster monitoring constellations, and the return on that investment has been colossal – we’ve had £150m in orders. And just before Christmas, the government agreed to invest £21m for us to launch a new radar remote sensing programme – we’ve changed the way optical imaging is done
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