Surrey Satellite Technology

Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) builds and runs small satellites. It started as a spin-off from the University of Surrey and is now fully owned by Airbus Defence and Space. The company grew out of work on amateur radio satellites, known as UoSAT or OSCAR missions. SSTL was set up in 1985 after successful tests using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts in satellites, starting with the UoSat-1 test satellite. It still funds research with the university’s Surrey Space Centre.

In April 2008, the University of Surrey agreed to sell its majority stake in the company to EADS Astrium. That August, SSTL opened a US subsidiary with offices and a production site in Denver, Colorado, but stopped manufacturing there in 2017 and closed the subsidiary. The company won the Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement in 1998 and the Queen’s Awards for Enterprise in 2005. In 2006, it received the Times Higher Education award for outstanding contribution to innovation and technology. In 2009, it ranked 89th out of 997 companies in the Sunday Times Top 100 companies to work for. In 2020, SSTL began building a telecommunications spacecraft called Lunar Pathfinder for lunar missions, due to launch in 2027 to relay data back to Earth.

During the Cold War, only a few superpowers could afford space access; satellites were expensive, limited, and could not be reprogrammed. In the late 1970s, a University of Surrey team led by Martin Sweeting experimented with COTS parts. Their first satellite, UoSAT-1, was built in a small lab using a cleanroom made from B&Q supplies and hand-drawn circuit boards on a kitchen table. Launched in 1981 with NASA’s help, it was the first modern reprogrammable small satellite and lasted over eight years instead of its planned three. The team then commercialised their work, founding SSTL in 1985 in Guildford, Surrey. Since then, it has worked with many international customers and launched over 70 satellites.

In 2002, SSTL moved into remote sensing with the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) and a subsidiary, DMC International Imaging. Some DMC satellites carried extra payloads like image compression (on BilSAT), GPS reflectometry, and an onboard Internet router (on UK-DMC). They used Internet Protocol for data and control, extending the Internet into space and enabling Interplanetary Internet experiments.