D-Orbit: Revolutionising space transport for the future of humanity

“Even on my 8th launch - still goosebumps. I mean, you realise that engineers can cry.”

Satellites are an essential part of keeping our modern lives running, allowing us to navigate, connect and observe the world from a phenomenal vantage point. But when a satellite is launched into space, it can take many months to get into position in order to start its mission. That was until D-Orbit changed the game.

Their satellite carrier ION optimises space operations by delivering satellites to their final destination in a matter of days, instead of months. D-Orbit is the world’s first space logistics company, and in this episode we find out how the company got started. We meet D-Orbit’s CTO Lorenzo Ferrario in the mission control centre, and hear stories of past launches when emotions run high amid the electric atmosphere.

We also hear from Brian Thompson, who heads up PTC’s CAD division. He explains how D-Orbit uses PTC’s CAD software CREO to model their bespoke satellites in a fast and efficient way.

Find out more about D-Orbit here.

Find out more about CREO here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Ollie Guillou. Location recording by Jonathan Zenti. Music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where we find ourselves in the Mission Control Centre of a major space operation.

I’m your host, Paul Haines, from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast we share the moments where digital transforms physical, and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology. 

Whether it’s improving the way we navigate the world through GPS, or making it possible to pay for our groceries from anywhere in the world, satellites have become an essential part of keeping our modern lives running. But up until fairly recently, launching satellites into space was a bit like throwing a stick into a river and waiting for the current to take it on its natural course. That is to say, it wasn’t very accurate. That was until Ion, a satellite carrier which solves the problem by delivering satellites exactly where they need to be, putting them into the correct orbit faster and more efficiently than ever before. And it’s an innovation from space logistics company D-orbit. A customer of PTC’s Italian partner Deda Group Business Solutions, and it means satellites can begin their essential work in a matter of days instead of months. 

Lorenzo Ferrario is D-orbit’s CTO and employee number one; he helped to invent and design Ion.

Okay, so this is our Mission Control Centre, basically the bridge of our spaceship. The desks, as you can see, are organised as the bridge of the Enterprise. What you can see on the wall are two big screens where all the orbits of our carriers are projected, and where you can see, in real time, the position in space of our six flying spacecraft, and the status of all of them. And indeed, here is where all the critical operations are executed like first acquisition of signal after launch, payload release generally, or critical operations during the mission. 

The position here, just on my back, this is called the captain position, where the director of the orchestra sits. Here in the front is operations, which is managing the operations of the space (??2:47), so basically sending and receiving commands, and especially everything that is related to altitude and flight control, like the helm of the ship. Engineering and communication, of course they do what they say they do. Engineering is for monitoring the status of the spacecraft, and communication is to monitor the status of the ground segment, because satellite is just as good as your link to it. So it’s very important to monitor in real time what happens on the stations, so on the antennas that we have on the ground.

Deda started in 2011, so it’s 11 years this year. I can say it now, it was crazy at the time, but now I can say it. We wanted to build spaceships that could matter. So we wanted to build a logistics infrastructure, we wanted to create a transportation infrastructure for the industry, for humanity, because we believe that transportation, so building roads, is the first thing that you need to do if you want to expand. So we started from there. That was the founding idea. 

The Ion Satellite Carrier is a very special spacecraft. I don’t like to call it a satellite because a satellite is something that flies in orbit, stays on that orbit for its whole life, and then is removed. Ion is not designed to do that, it’s designed to move. It’s designed to be an agile spacecraft. So you can imagine it as a last-mile delivery service that is taken to orbit by big rockets. Sometimes even multiple Ions at a time, like is going to happen in the next mission. Ion is loaded with the customers, which are satellites and other payloads. By using its own propulsive means, once in orbit, Ion moves from orbit to orbit releasing and delivering, in the end, our customers – which, again, are satellites and other payloads, to where they have to go.

So, we are in the clean room, it’s basically where we like to say the magic happens. So where we turn bare metal into spacecrafts. What we are doing right now is we are dressing up. So we are dressing up with coats, hair nets, beard nets, and shoe covers to get inside – because inside, the air is very clean. We don’t want any dust to deposit on optics to deposit on hardware components, actuators or mechanisms. And so the air is maintained in a clean, temperature and humidity controlled environment. It is very common in the space industry. I would say it’s pretty mandatory. So we’re about to enter now. 

Okay, here we are. Okay, so this is our clean room. It’s divided into sectors. It’s been reorganised several times over the last few months to accommodate an ever-growing line of production. Right now we can accommodate 15 carriers per year as a rate of manufacturing. What you can see are three carriers in various manufacturing stages. Manufacturing is organised similarly to automotives. So the satellites move along the production line to the various stages. And once they’ve finished, they exit from that door, which is called the airlock, and shipped away to the launch site. At the moment, we have in manufacturing here and other two which have been completed, which are on their way to Cape Canaveral for a launch in the next few weeks.

Okay, if we move a little bit here, on our left side, what you see here, these big bottles, shiny bottles, these are the propellant tanks for propulsion. So one of the big advantages, and actually one of the selling points, of our carrier is the capability of conducting orbital manoeuvres. So once it’s in flight, it’s released by the launcher, it has its own propulsion system, its own thrusters, its own little rockets, so they can move up and down to reach the final orbital destination of our customers. And of course, you need a propellant. Actually you need much more oxidizer than fuel. So what you see here is the tanks for the oxidizer. And on the other side, you see the tanks for the fuel.

Launch day is always a little bit of a strange day. Generally, launches happen at strange times. So most of the times they don’t happen during work hours. Generally you wake up, you go to work, you don’t work all day, because you try to work, but you can’t. So you don’t work all day, then since most of the launches that we did so far happened overnight, a good number of people from the office go out for dinner together, and then we meet for the launch. And even if it’s the fifth or sixth time you see a launch, it is always a little bit of a stress because, after years of work, there’s a barely controlled bomb that is exploding in a continent far away, and everything happens in 10 minutes. It’s a little bit of stress, and I don’t think you really can get used to it. I mean, I am not ashamed to say that I’ve cried a few times. 

But then, of course, like the soccer team on the day of the match, there is the operations team. They are, for that day, focused completely, like in a Zen state, which they don’t they don’t go to work, they just come for the lunchtime because they have to be well rested. Of course, I’m prepared to take over operations because what happens is that we follow the streaming from the video that the launch provider gives us, we follow the launch, and what happens is, at some point, our carrier is released from the launcher. When that happens, the carrier turns on – because the switches on the carrier tell the computer that the release has happened – so everything comes to life. The first thing it does is look for the sun, because it’s powered by solar panels, so Sun is life. So it stops any kind of tumbling that was induced by the separation. And then, after that, it starts calling round. So it starts opening a radio connection, a radio transmission, which we call the beacon. So every few seconds it sends an “I’m here,” kind of message. And the first time that it passes over one of our stations – which, again, maybe minutes or sometimes even one hour after the launch – you have what is called the acquisition of signal. So AOS. That is the tensest moment, and I have goosebumps just saying it. If you can imagine, everybody at that time, which is generally night-time, everybody in the office is there, the team is in the control centre, extremely focused, especially on the composition – because the comm is where you see the spectrum, as recorded by the antennas. And the only thing you can do at that moment is just wait. Wait and see if the spacecraft calls on. And again, goosebumps. As soon as you get contact, as soon as you recognise the signal, the dance happens. So you start sending commands, you start receiving telemetry, and at that point, you verify how the satellite is, so if everything is well after launch, and you start what is called the commissioning of the spacecraft, the commissioning is basically the beginning of life. It’s goosebumps every time. You realise that engineers can cry. 

Well, the future of the space industry is very bright, and it’s very exciting. So we’ve seen things happening, things that we never thought would have happened, ever. I remember very clearly the day we were given mathematical proof, by doing a lecture at the university, that landing a rocket was not possible, or not convenient. And I remember very clearly, the day in which certain company did land the rocket. And now it has become a routine. It’s literally landing a rocket vertically on a ship, on a barge, in the middle of the ocean, 600 kilometres away from the launch pad. Which is crazy. Over the last two years, we launched more satellites than the last 30 years combined. So again, this was also something that was not thought possible. So it’s very exciting. We are in a situation where there are a lot of different solutions to the same problems. So it’s also very exciting because this is where creativity matters. And so it’s very exciting, because you can literally see the effects of the choices that you make, not just on the products that the company makes, but also on everybody else. So how we design Ion conditioned our competitors to design their own carriers, and, in the end, our constellations have been designed around that service. And basically everything started from a decision that 20 people took in 2018. So you can really, really see the effect not just on what we do, but on what on everybody else in the world is doing. So that’s extremely exciting. In terms of possibility, I believe that we are in a stage of space history in which we are transitioning from a phase of exploration, which has been everything that has been in this industry since 1957 to now, into a phase of expansion in which we go to stay – we don’t go to come back and then go somewhere else. This is a huge step, because it means that space is no longer seen as a frontier of go, peek and come back. But it becomes a place where you can go and stay, so it becomes one of the environments of humanity, just like sea, air, and, of course, ground. So I really do believe, and I’m really convinced, that we are in the generation that will see life extending outside Earth – basically the normalisation of space. We will stop talking about space as we do right now, and we will start talking about space as we do for aircraft, for example. When space will become boring it will mean that we’ve done a good job.

Each of D-orbit’s clients has different requirements, so its missions are never identical. To make sure they can adapt quickly to client requests, they need software which models the final product in a fast and efficient way. That’s where PTC’s 3D computer-aided design software Creo comes in. We’ve discussed the merits of Creo in previous episodes, but as a quick reminder as to what Creo is and how it helps manufacturers in industry today, Creo is PTC’s flagship 3D CAD solution for the market. Primarily, the reason why customers started moving to 3D CAD 30 years ago is simply because until the invention of really scalable, commercial-ready 3D CAD design engineers had to, for lack of a better term, imagine the third dimension of their designs. They were doing everything in 2D. And frankly, the level of additional comfort and confidence that design engineers get by being able to completely define their designs in full 3D is really hard to underestimate. It is extremely valuable to have full confidence in your designs in 3D to make sure those designs can go together, as the manufacturing team starts to assemble them, to make sure those designs are manufacturable as the manufacturing engineers decide how to apply, say, (NC toolpaths? 16:40), or injection moulding processes to those parts. 

The fact that the model is fully defined in 3D gives rise to all of these other design checks, manufacturability checks, serviceability checks, because you now can evaluate designs in ways that customers never could before. And so 3D CAD, the process of defining your designs in 3D, is really fundamentally giving customers the full capability of evaluating that design from every respect in the value chain, from every point of view in the value chain. And I think that is why 3D design is continuing to grow remarkably in the world of discrete manufacturing. Creo’s ability to capture whatever it is you need to model is one of its fundamental strengths. 

So, how does Creo help D-orbit meet those tight deadlines? D-orbit has a pretty significant challenge, because first of all, their assembly is very large, and the complexity of bringing together hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of parts into particular modules that didn’t get stuck together into a larger assembly, just that complexity is extremely difficult to do if you’re trying to do all that in 2D. And it turns out that Creo is particularly adept at helping customers with visualising and managing the development of very large assemblies. It’s not just that Creo can, say, open a large assembly quickly. Of course it can. But it’s also that Creo helps design engineers get to their design context really efficiently. Design engineers don’t need the entire assembly up when they’re working on one particular part of the assembly. But they do need to say, “Hey, here’s the area of the design that I want to be working in right now.” And Creo has great tools for helping design engineers efficiently tell our system, “This is the area I want to work in, please give me everything and all the detail that I need in this area so that I can get my work done effectively.” And it understands how to keep all of that up to date, even though the design engineer is working in a very small part of the design at any one time. So really, really powerful stuff working on large assemblies.