Space technology worth €25m to Irish firms

Irish firms are generating annual spin-off sales of €25 million from technology developed for use in space under contracts with the European Space Agency (Esa), according to Enterprise Ireland.

Some 19 of Enterprise Ireland's client companies, including the Cork firm Sensl, which is designing a detector to be used in an Esa mission to Mars, won contracts worth a total of €5.7 million with Esa last year. Contracts secured by multinationals based in the Republic takes the value of European civil space business up to €7 million. Irish firms' involvement in the space sector will expand this year and will be driven by partnerships between optoelectronics companies and large European space companies, according to Tony McDonald, head of the Esa programme at Enterprise Ireland.

Sensl, which is a commercial spin-off from the Tyndall Institute in Cork, is developing a detector for a laser range-finder that will allow a planned Esa probe to Mars to find the best surface to land on. Under its technology, a small laser pulse is emitted, bouncing off the surface of the planet and coming back to hit the detector. The process is timed, allowing the probe to work out how rough the surface is, according to Dr Carl Jackson, Sensl's chief commercial officer.

Sensl's technology can also be used to measure pollutants in the atmosphere and has other potential applications on earth, for example in so-called "smart cars" with built-in anti-collision detectors and in biomedical devices that can use the technology to examine DNA and protein samples with greater sensitivity.

Another company, a telecommunications firm called Intune, is working on "tunable" laser technology for weather sensing systems that will help Esa measure water concentration levels in the earth's atmosphere.

"Esa take a 10-year view of technology that is at the research stage now and give 100 per cent funding, so they are an excellent support," said John Dunne, chief marketing officer at Intune, which has just completed a fundraising of almost $18 million (€13.3 million) from a consortium of international investors. Each ESA contract can be worth anything up to €500,000 to a firm, Mr Dunne said. But the real value to Irish companies lies in the additional commercial opportunities for the products they develop. Around 50 Irish companies and research organisations in the telecommunications, software, electronics and precision engineering fields have participated in Enterprise Ireland's space programme since 2000.

Proving that their technology is space-worthy is the problematic part, according to Mr McDonald.

"A lot of these technologies are at a very early stage of development. They have to prove that it can be used in space and that is very expensive."

Esa, which describes itself as Europe's gateway to space, has an annual budget of around €3 billion.