Stars in his eyes

Cape Canaveral, Houston and Baikonur are all locations that readily trip off the tongue of any self-respecting armchair astronaut. Guildford almost certainly isn’t.

But while the leafy surrey town is perhaps more redolent of middle-England curtain-twitching than cosmic exploration, this quiet corner of the UK also happens to be home to a company that has made a name for itself as a leading member of the global space science community: Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL).

Spun out of Surrey University in 1985 to commercialise the results of its small satellite engineering research programme, SSTL is headed by Prof Sir Martin Sweeting, a passionate advocate for the UK space industry whose 1970s PhD work at Surrey was the catalyst for SSTL’s commercial success. For instance, in the late 1970s he designed and built UoSat-1, a small 50kg satellite that he managed to get launched and communicating through amateur radio bands back to a ground station at the Surrey campus.