Over the past year, the Irish space industry has been involved in a range of projects that are delivering significant benefits here on Earth in areas such as climate change, improving farm efficiency and supporting advances in next-generation mobile communications.
“A lot of people are not aware that Ireland is active in space,” says Enterprise Ireland’s Padraig Doolan, who is Ireland’s national delegate to the European Space Agency (ESA). “Ireland was a founding member of ESA in 1975. Today, 109 companies are interacting with ESA. Our target was to reach 100 by 2025 – we’ve already exceeded that.”
Enterprise Ireland’s role is to “take nimble and innovative Irish technology companies and plug them into the ESA supply chain,” Doolan explains. “We are focused on jobs and export sales, whatever the sector. We treat space like any other market vertical and we take the same approach with it as for any other sector, like automotive or pharma.”
During 2023 alone ESA placed contracts worth almost €10 million with Irish companies, with industrial activities accounting for the bulk of this figure. Industrial co-funding reached €2.2 million during the year. In addition, 25 companies, including three new space-active entities, were supported to develop high-tech products in Ireland.
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“In the last 15 years we have seen the emergence of the NewSpace sector,” says Doolan. “This involves private-sector companies solving hard, difficult challenges. Our job is to spot the opportunities and match them with technical capability here at home.”
Irish companies are not trying to compete with the large aerospace companies that developed their own ecosystems and heritage dating back to the 1940s, he adds: “Where we are strong is in developing technology. For example, a camera developed by Irish company Réaltra was on the Ariane 5 launcher that launched the James Webb Space Telescope. It captured the iconic image of the telescope as it unfurled in space. ESA now wants Réaltra cameras on all of its launchers.”
That means all the images from the new generation of Ariane 6 launchers will be captured by Irish technology.
“We are not trying to develop an Irish launcher,” says Doolan. “We are developing technology for launchers and other space projects. Because we don’t have large space industry we need to establish our own space heritage.”
It is not just a matter of ESA awarding contracts; the agency’s technical experts work with Irish companies to raise the technology readiness level (TRL) of their products and make them space ready.
“They have specialists across areas including aerospace engineering, avionics, radiation and so on. We rely on ESA for all of that expertise.”
Another example of Irish technology in space is the gyroscopes developed by Innolabs for the Hera 6 mission launched in October. This mission is a follow-up to the Nasa Dart planetary defence mission which flew into an asteroid to deflect its orbital path. Hera will measure the precise amount of deflection achieved to inform future planetary defence missions should an asteroid on a collision course with Earth be identified.
“The Innolabs gyroscope has been identified as a critical piece of infrastructure for achieving strategic European space autonomy,” says Doolan.
A notable milestone for Ireland’s space activities was reached in December 2023 with the launch of the country’s first satellite. EIRSAT-1 was designed, built, and tested by students from University College Dublin participating in ESA Academy’s Fly Your Satellite! programme.
The satellite has three payloads: a gamma-ray module to study gamma-ray bursts, which are the most luminous explosions in the universe and occur when a massive star dies or two stars collide; an experiment to see how a thermal treatment protects the surface of a satellite when in space developed by Irish company Enbio; and wave-based control, to test a new method of using Earth’s magnetic field to change a satellite’s orientation in space.
“The satellite has done well over 40,000 orbits of Earth, travelled more than 200 million kilometres and detected two gamma-ray bursts in August,” says Doolan. “This is a really nice example of how industry is able to support something led by academia. An organisation within ESA is using that story to encourage industry and the academic community to come together for other space projects.”
Another significant first was recorded in March of this year when Irish company Ubotica Technologies successfully launched its CogniSAT-6 satellite. The satellite’s high-resolution camera can reveal the chemical make-up of objects for use in a range of applications, from monitoring the health of crops to detecting illegal fishing and monitoring power grids. What makes it special is the use of AI to maintain a real-time data flow and transmit insights back to Earth within minutes.
It is not just a matter of designing a clever piece of technology; it has to be capable of performing in the extremely harsh conditions of space.
“The technology has to be able to withstand huge vibration, radiation, extreme temperatures and work every time,” says Doolan. “You can have a payload worth hundreds of millions of euros and you can’t have it failing due to a poor-quality component. It would be a bit like the horse being lost for want of a nail. Nightmares like that need to be avoided.
“ESA has extremely high standards and innovative Irish companies are meeting them. They are all fabulous companies and we are very proud of them.”