On December 17th last, a gigantic space rocket took off from French Guiana, shaking the ground around it with shock waves of thrust as it lifted off and headed out beyond the atmosphere. This was the Ariane 6 rocket, a booster capable of lifting as much as 21-tonnes into Earth orbit, and the first bit of the rocket that poked above 100km – the official edge of space – was made in Ireland.
It’s a camera, a high-quality video telemetry system, offering both stunning images of the science and visceral thrill of space flight, as well as useful data for the ground-based engineers on how the mighty Ariane and its cargoes are performing.
That camera was made by Réaltra Space Systems Engineering, based in Clonsaugh Co Dublin. “That was the second contract we won, actually” Réaltra’s engineering manager Michael Martin tells Business Ireland magazine. “It was quite ambitious, because putting a camera on the outside of a rocket hadn’t really been done up to that point, although Space X has done it since. On the outside of the rocket, you get a lot of shock and vibration with the separation of the stages, and someone did suggest that we should test the strength of the camera by shoving a stick of dynamite under it. We didn’t do that ...”
The stick of dynamite test may not have happened, but there’s no question that Réaltra, to coin a phrase, had a rocket put under it when an unexpected request came in, asking the company to be involved in one of the biggest, and now most famous, space projects of all.
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“We were working very closely with ArianeGroup on the camera system for the Ariane 6 booster, but then we were asked if we could fit the system to the older Ariane 5 rocket, the one that was going to launch the James Webb space telescope” says Martin. “This caused a lot of issues with Nasa, because this was the most expensive satellite ever to be launched, and we were going to be putting a new camera system one metre away from this package, at the tip of the rocket. I mean, we were just a little Irish company, only getting started, so you can imagine the reaction from Nasa and the hoops we had to jump through to convince them that it would work, and that we wouldn’t damage their satellite.”
Not only did the camera system work, but it provided such gorgeous, clear images of the lift off of the James Webb mission that Martin says the head of Nasa phoned him, in tears, to say thank you and that the image would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Réaltra’s efforts and success are part of a broader, and possibly surprising, sweep of Irish success in the space-tech industry. The global market for such technology was reckoned to be worth €436 billion last year. Of that, Ireland won a small but growing amount of investment, including some €24 million in contracts from the European Space Agency (ESA).
Of course, Ireland is a signatory to the ESA, and as such is required to contribute to ESA’s budget. There are rewards for doing so, however.
“For every euro you put in, Ireland gets a guaranteed 80 cents or 85 cent back,” says Padraig Doolan, Enterprise Ireland’s national delegate to ESA. “It varies slightly from programme to programme. So, everyone kind of gets back what they get in. It’s not like Horizon Europe, where you can do very well one cycle and very badly another cycle.”
That’s the direct financial benefit of being a part of ESA, but there’s more to Ireland’s space involvement than that, as Doolan explains: “We are absolutely focused on delivering a really good return on investment the money we get from the Irish public. We estimate that the return on investment is about five to one. So, for every €1 spent in space, we get about €5 back into the Irish economy.”
There are indirect benefits too, such as being able to utilise the information and data gathered by space missions, which can vary from the esoteric (an experiment on the International Space Station found that fish from Earth get confused by zero gravity, but fish bred in space have no problems with it) to the far more obviously useful such as weather and climate monitoring, or crop growth analysis.
Beyond that, Doolan says that being involved in space exploration brings other benefits: “That investment is creating jobs. Our focus is very much on developing new technologies, raising existing technologies with what’s called technology readiness level. So that’s making them more space-ready than they were before. And we utilise ESA for that, because they’ve got the experts and the processes to deliver. And then once that technology has been raised up, it’s ready for use by ESA, but then it’s also available for other commercial actors outside ESA to purchase for use in their in their operations. And then we, wherever possible, try to see that if you’re developing a technology for space, we want to see that there’s a terrestrial application as well, if possible. So that’s opening up new market verticals all the time.”
However, there can be problems. Ireland is, of course, technically a neutral country, but space technology has always had strong, occasionally shadowy, connections to the military. After all, NASA’s most famous Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts were drawn from military flight test programmes, even if the agency itself is a civilian one. Spool back further still, and Wernher von Braun, creator of the Nazis’ V2 rocket weapon, mused after its first use: “The rocket performed well. It just landed on the wrong planet.”
Do Irish companies baulk at the thought of working on technology that can have significant military applications? “I think it wouldn’t surprise me if that is the case, that companies feel that way, but I’m certain no one’s ever said it to me,” Doolan says. “None of the activity we undertake with ESA is ever to be utilised for military or defence purposes. So, any company can happily work with us and collaborate with ESA safely. Practically all of our space companies develop dual-use technology. That’s the nature of the game. But Enterprise Ireland will only support them, and ESA will only support them, if it’s civil use only.”
While it’s great to be making money out in space, it’s also important to remember that there’s an importance to astronomical and space research that’s worth doing for its own sake – that knowledge is greater than cash.
“We’re coming up to our fifth anniversary as a member of the European Southern Observatory (ESO),” says Niall Smith, head of the Blackrock Castle Observatory in Cork, nowadays a part of Munster Technical University (MTU).
The ESO is a group of telescopes in Chile’s Atacama Desert, run by scientists from 16 European member states, as well as Chile as the host country. “Our astronomers publish a lot of papers and get a lot of citations, so we’re punching above our weight. But the astronomical community in Ireland is small, and I think this is an opportunity to expand that community,” Smith adds.
“At the moment, we’re working on a research and innovation space strategy, and part of that is to try to look at how we would expand the scale of that activity. We’re not so worried about the excellence – we’ve got really excellent people, we’ve got really excellent universities – but relative to our GDP, we need to scale up. If you’re excellent, you’re more competitive. If you’re more competitive, more people want to work with you. More people would be interested in getting you to develop new instruments and so on.
“But at the moment, our investment in the space and astronomy side of things is something that we need to look at, and I think we can look at it with confidence to contribute more. So, I think we’re contributing well above our weight, but it’s about the scaling of that, giving more Irish citizens opportunities to be involved in some of these really, really significant endeavours.”
Those endeavours could lead to the answer to the biggest, most fundamental question of all – are we alone in the universe. The very same James Webb telescope that Réaltra helped to launch peering deep into our galaxy and staring at the atmosphere of a planet with the un-snappy name of K2-18B.
K2-18B is 124 light years from Earth, and it orbits a red dwarf star. Thanks to a quirk of coincidence, it orbits in such a way, relative to us, that it passes directly in front of its own star every few hours. That is what allowed the James Webb Telescope to find it – by measuring the dimming of the far-off star’s light as the planet passes in front of it – and also what allows us to take a peek at the atmosphere of the planet.
That’s how, using a telescope orbiting Earth at a distance of almost a million kilometres, looking at a planet that’s so far away the light from it takes 124 light years to reach us, scientists have been able to detect what they think is dimethyl sulphide, and from that infer that biological life is taking place on that planet. Alien life. Alien to us, anyway, but potentially, just maybe, possibly proof that we humans are not alone in the universe, nor even in our own galaxy.
Staring at the stars from the island of Ireland goes back way beyond even MTU’s 16th-century castle – the tombs of Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth show that even the earliest residents of these parts knew something of what was happening the heavens. In the centuries since – a mere blink in astronomical terms – we’ve gone from stone buildings aligned with the rising sun to a €10 billion super-telescope orbiting farther out than the Moon. One which may have just nabbed a first real glance at our cosmic neighbours.
The proof could come at any moment. As Smith says: “It could be just like we’re chatting here on a Friday, talking about the Wow Signal, and then on the Saturday morning, that’s it – it’s happened.”
In the meantime, Ireland’s space industry will continue to play a vital role. The next Ariane 6 launch will carry a new satellite for Europe’s Galileo global positioning system network, and once again, the first part of the rocket that passes out of our atmosphere and into space will be a camera made in Clonsaugh.
