The year was 1908 and the automobile was the prestige product of the age. Designed by brilliant engineers with names like Daimler and Benz, they were built one at a time by skilled craftsmen and sold in small numbers to the very wealthy.
In that year of 1908, it all changed – because that was the year when the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line. The car cost 23,000 of today’s dollars, and the price fell every year until – a decade later – Model Ts made up half of all cars in America.
Ford conquered the market by making cars simpler and more standard, and by creating that famous assembly line to produce them in large numbers with consistent quality.
Today, that same revolution is coming to a product that is literally out of this world. For decades, skilled engineers and technicians have been building satellites designed for unique missions and making them one at a time. They have delivered one or two dozen per year, each with a high price tag and each designed to operate for decades in high orbit around Earth.
But the business of space is changing as companies begin putting dozens or hundreds or thousands of satellites in orbit. Satellites whose cameras reveal Earth’s secrets in astounding new detail. Satellites whose antennas bring high-capacity communication to the remotest corners of the globe.
Space is nothing like the roads traveled by the Model T. It is airless, freezing cold and blazing hot, and flooded with radiation. Building for it is hard. But the assembly line has come to the manufacturing of satellites, and nothing will ever be the same again.
Two Weeks to Build a Satellite
In a new factory near Cape Canaveral, Florida, OneWeb Satellites operates the most automated assembly lines in the business. They run in a clean room the size of 24 basketball courts that keeps them free of contaminants that could lead to failure in space.
Components arrive at the building in a steady stream from a supply chain that stretches around the world. Two weeks later, finished satellites emerge from the other side at a rate of up to two per day.
In between is the assembly line, where engineers, technicians, tools and robotics take part in a complex dance of creation. They build components into standard modules, and automated vehicles carry them to an assembly station, where teams assemble them into finished satellites. At each step, there are automated tests to check quality. Satellites that fail are sidelined for repair.
And the testing isn’t finished when the satellite is in one piece. It goes next into one of 32 special chambers for two days of testing to make sure it can survive the trauma of rocket launch and work reliably in the airless, blazing and freezing conditions it will meet in space.
Only when it has passed this battery of tests is it ready to be racked and stacked for its journey to the launch pad.
The Space Economy
Forecasters see an exciting future for space and satellite. Step by step, we are laying the foundations of a 1 trillion dollar space economy reaching from the Earth to the Moon and Mars. And with each step, life on Earth gets better. Fewer lives are lost to disaster, disease and poverty. More food reaches the hungriest thanks to data from space. More people connect to broadband by satellite. And new industries begin putting the limitless resources of space to work for everyone.
Rocket launches are thrilling – and rocket landings are a marvel. But it is on the humble assembly line that the future is taking shape every day.
Produced for SpaceNews by Space & Satellite Professionals International
See more stories and videos of satellite making a better world at www.bettersatelliteworld.com.
