By Claire Corrigan
A Mullingar native has been greatly instrumental in the creation of a tiny satellite by Glasgow firm Alba Orbital.
The small Scots start-up company is about to launch its own satellite into space, which is the size of a drinks can.
After a year’s development, the company has created the cuboid shaped satellite to be used to monitor aeroplanes and are ready to see it launched into space on the back of a Russian rocket early next year.
The satellite – which is no bigger than a can of Coke – is the smallest of its kind made in the UK, and will be deployed in a pod, before blasting out into the darkness of the solar system.
Mullingar native and Electronics Engineer Conor Forde spoke to Topic about how he became involved with the team. “I went to America on a J1 after I finished college and got a job in San Francisco working for a satellite company out there. I went to a satellite conference and met Tom Walkinshaw who is the founder of Alba Orbital and we had a beer.”
Five months later, Conor had returned to Ireland when he received a call from Tom asking him if he wanted to work for his company.
Now living in Bunbrosna, Conor works for the company remotely, using his laptop and visiting Glasgow once a month. “I design the internals of the satellite, like the power system and the computer and the solar panels,” he explained.
Conor said his passion for space began at eight but was disappointed to discover he could never work at the famous space station because of his nationality. “I found out that because I wasn’t American, I could never work for NASA, so the dream kind of died a bit for me then, but the private industry has less constraints about nationality, so the door opened again for me to work in the industry.”
Alba Orbital’s satellite will be launched with hundreds of others – some 200 times bigger and will track planes, Conor told Topic, “Every plane sends out its location and its speed so that air traffic control can pick it up. Over land, that’s taken care, of but over the ocean, where there’s no ground base, receivers or radar, so like the Malaysian plane, they can go missing every now and then. So we’re making satellites to track them from above. Up until now, planes have been tracked by very large satellites that cost billions of euro. Because we are making smaller satellites that you can put in your hand, you can send up a lot more of them and have more global coverage for the same price as one or two big satellites that may or may not be overhead when your plane goes missing.”
Conor said that even at college, he never dreamed that he would be able to work on projects like this. “Sometimes you had to take the dive to do something you really want to do in life. Some people like to say, ‘Don’t follow your dreams, it’s too risky, but sometimes it does work.”
Tom Walkinshaw, 26, who owns the company, said, “It’s really exciting and it’s the goal of the company. But we’re not there yet – it needs to launch successfully. We’re focused on getting it finished. We hope it’s the first of many and we can showcase our technology.”
Tom said, “Ours will be one of the satellites on board when it launches in the south part of Russia. The biggest on board is 110kg – ours is half a kilogram – and 200 times our size. The smaller you make it, the lower the cost it is. It’s around six figures. We’re in partnership with the European Space Agency and the Innovate UK space team in a technology development project. It’s our first satellite and our technology is going into space for the first time. It’s quite a big deal for us.”
