Interview with Professor Sir Martin Sweeting

Professor Sir Martin Sweeting was born in 1951, in Highgate, London. He has two older brothers and a younger sister.  Martin says of his early life: “It was very enjoyable, my elder brothers were much older than me and I saw very little of them, so, it was really my sister and myself that grew up together. … My earliest recollections are being fascinated with communications starting with the traditional two baked bean cans and a long piece of string, and later managing to get a little bit of a wired sort of ‘Dan Dare-style’ telephone. My sister always complains that it was always her that was sent out into the garden while I sat in the house to see whether these communication links worked.

“There was something about the ability to communicate beyond the limits of just shouting to somebody that really fascinated me and that really started me off in the whole career.  It was a very nice childhood, a lot of time outside as we were fortunate to have an unusually large garden and also our parents very much left us to our devices, so we would construct games, we would make little forts and Meccano constructions and other little sort of pseudo-technology things with my train set. So, technology was in my blood right from the beginning.”

Martin’s father was a poet and his mother an artist, his maternal grandfather had been a mechanic and his paternal grandfather was an inventor and entrepreneur.

Martin adds: “He had a windmill at the bottom of the garden to generate electricity back in the 1900s, he started libraries and he was clearly an entrepreneur.  So, somehow the genes of the entrepreneurial side from my father’s side and possibly the mechanical side from my mother’s side came together in me. I was really the black sheep of the family, in the sense that my sister is an artist, my mother was an artist, my father was into literature and poetry and so I was very much the odd one out and therefore very much left to my own devices and left to play with electronics.”

Martin went to his local primary school, followed by Normansal boarding prep school on the Sussex Downs. He says: “Primary school was very miserable. My mother complained that it was really very difficult to get me to go to primary school. It was a very strict regime, and it didn’t suit me terribly well, but I managed to get through it unscathed.”

Martin says of his boarding prep school: “It was a very curious school, which I don’t think my parents ever really realised. It had virtually no rules. The only rules there were that you had to turn up for lessons and after that you could do whatever you want and so we used to get up to all manner of things and spent quite a bit of time outside living in the grounds in little home-made hutches. We even made an igloo during the frozen winter of 1964 and lived in that. …. It was a very interesting and stimulating environment of which my parents had clearly no idea, but that’s why the kids were so happy.”

After finishing at Normansal, Martin went onto a senior boarding public school called Aldenham School. He adds: “That was a bit of shock to say the least, because I went from a pretty well laissez-faire environment to one which was very regimented, although I realise now, compared to some other places, it was also relatively enlightened.” It was here that he studied A-Levels in physics, chemistry, and maths despite the fact that English, French and Latin were his best academic subjects.

My interest was in physics in the broadest sense and so I did physics, chemistry, and mathematics. … The school tried to direct me more towards my strength in the arts, but I really wanted to do physics.”

With no computers at school, Martin made a connection with City University, London, to use their computer. He says: “I managed to wangle my way in to be able to use their computer to do some little experiments. These were computers where you had to punch out holes in a card manually, feed the cards in, and then come back a day or two later to find out you had made a spelling mistake and had to do the whole thing again.  It wasn’t IT by today’s standards, but it caught my imagination.”

After his A levels, Martin was accepted to study electrical and electronic engineering at University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). However, while visiting a school friend in Guildford, Martin made a snap decision to switch to the new University of Surrey which was in the process of being built.

He says: “It is really interesting to look back because I think that decision which, goodness knows why I made it, was key. As a new university it had no history, no baggage, so later on, as an undergraduate and then a post-graduate, when I wanted to do things which were a little bit unusual, shall we say for a university, they said, ‘let’s give it a go.’ … Some of my school friends who then went to more established universities found it very, very difficult to do anything extracurricular that was a little bit out of the box.”

The university had grown partly out of Battersea College of Technology and partly from the University of Free Poland during the war. It took a hands-on approach, recruited new staff primarily from industry and prided itself on its industry links. It also had a large contingent of Polish technicians and lecturers of whom Martin says: “were always willing to help and quite keen to do something new.” This, together with its industry links, Martin says created “quite a fertile environment.”

As a student, Martin spent most of his time ‘playing with radios, radio transmitters, receivers, and making satellite tracking equipment to receive signals from the then soviet and American satellites’. He was supported in his research projects by the head of the department.   He adds: “I managed to get my degree, but it wasn’t a terribly good one, because I spent all my time actually doing things that I was interested in.”

His interest in satellites grew from having watched the Apollo missions and science fiction films of the 1960s and ‘70s and learning about military radio communications as a cadet. He adds: “I wanted to get involved in space, I couldn’t be an astronaut, because astronauts tended to either come from the Soviet Union or from America and I couldn’t see a way to do that.  So, the next best thing would be to see if we could build a satellite and the new microelectronics, terribly crude by today’s standards, gave me the concept that you could build a satellite using these components and make it much smaller, cheaper, and yet, actually quite capable by the standards of the day.  Using the micro controls, the microprocessors, you could potentially reprogramme it in orbit and adjust as you went along.  It was just at the very beginning when these consumer microelectronics were beginning to emerge which allowed me to get into space on a budget and on a scale which was feasible in a university lab.”

Martin’s work on satellites took place in his spare time while he was completing his PhD, sponsored by MEL, part of Philips, into making very short HF aerials work more efficiently.

During his degree, Martin spent his third year on an industry placement at Marconi Space Defence in North London. He started working on underwater weapons control systems which he found it interesting but was not particularly good at it. He then moved to the communications section which he found much more interesting. The experience taught him a life lesson. Having witnessed that there were people there who had done the same job for many years, he says: “I felt somehow that this was not really what I wanted to do. I quite liked the work and so on, but it didn’t really inspire me to go and work for a big company.”

While he was completing his PhD, Martin decided to build and launch a satellite. He scrounged materials and money and through volunteer help, managed to build it ready for launch a year after his PhD was completed. He explains: “It was launched and to everyone’s surprise it worked and then a couple of years later NASA came back and asked us if we would launch a second satellite – but in six months’ time. So, we had to work with our volunteers night and day to build the second satellite – but we did it (just) and it launched and it worked.”

After the second successful launch, Martin’s volunteers went out to find jobs and Martin was offered a job in what he calls a pseudo-government establishment. However, he decided to turn it down. He adds: “I realised you can do something like building the satellites with volunteers, scrounged equipment and facilities, and everybody’s goodwill, once, and you can just about do it twice, but you can’t keep on like that, you have to put it on a proper basis.”

Having realised that the university were not going to continue funding their projects, Martin decided they needed to find someone to pay for their projects and the best way to do that was to set up a company, Surrey Satellite Technology.  “By setting up a company, we could go out and buy things that we wanted, have a financial process which was more flexible than the university financing system. So, the company was set up in order to be able to carry on what was, I suppose some people would have considered, a bit of a hobby.”

Martin already had links the AMSAT, the American Amateur Satellite Corporation which had provided him with links to NASA to get his first two satellites launched. Of his relationship with NASA, he says: “They really took it on board and were very supportive, much to their credit.  It provided credibility and contacts, both in the UK and overseas, and so when we started the company and started to see how to make money to pay for more satellites, that helped a great deal.

“Today, start-ups happen every day, but it was a very different thing in 1985.  Universities didn’t have start-ups, there were few venture capitalists.  In fact, when I did talk to venture capitalists, I realised the one thing which was inappropriate in their vocabulary was the word venture. They wanted dead-cert; they were ‘dead-cert capitalists’.  So, we decided to avoid any investments and basically grow the company organically by putting in effort, getting contracts, reinvesting what small profits we made. The whole motivation was not to make a lot of money, the objective was to have enough money to eat, survive and to build satellites. If we made a profit, then we used to that develop the next better satellite. It might seem a bit naïve by today’s start-up standards, but that was the motivation; to do something in space.”

Martin did secure some university research grants in the early days, but the growth was otherwise organic, until much later on when Elon Musk became an investor. Martin adds: “Organic growth means you retain control but it’s slow. One of the things I realised when we did talk to some potential investors was that they would want us to focus on the things that would make money quickest and return their investments, rather than the things that we thought were good ideas. That is why I opted for organic growth so that  we had the freedom to do what we believed in and to make our own mistakes, and if it went wrong well, we couldn’t blame anybody except ourselves.  Whereas, when we looked at potential investors, they were always going to constrain us into going down paths which generated the greatest return on their investment, understandably.”

The company, while growing organically remained closely associated with the academic Surrey Space Centre as Martin explains: “We always ran the commercial SSTL, Surrey Satellites, alongside the academic team from the Surrey Space Centre. The academic team of researchers would be always looking at what’s the new technology that’s coming down the line, what opportunities might there be technologically in the five or ten years. Sometimes, when the commercial projects ran into challenges, we could use their academic experience to help us solve it. There was a very strong symbiotic relationship between the university academic research team and the company. In fact, people and staff moved from one to the other, we had joint PhDs and so forth, it was a very intimate, intellectual relationship, it was completely separate financially, but intellectually, it was very close, and I think that was the real trick.”

Selecting some milestones from the company’s growth, Martin points to the first major contract; a collaborative programme with South Korea to build their first satellites. The project gave them the opportunity to reinvest in future space technologies. He goes on to highlight some of the other contracts and changes they made: “We then did a number of projects working with China, Thailand, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Portugal and the French MOD.  Later, we decided that our small satellites were not really capable enough, we needed a slightly bigger satellite. We also realised we wouldn’t be able to rely on NASA providing us with free launches after the first two satellites, and so we had to develop relationships with other rocket providers in Russia, India, and so on.

“There were a number of ‘gear changes’, the first contract, then building what we called mini satellite, trying to find a rocket to launch it on, finding a Russian missile, an SS-18 intercontinental nuclear missile which was being decommissioned, making sure the warhead was not still on it and placing our satellite on it instead, then getting it reprogrammed so that it went up into orbit, rather coming back down again. Launching that from silo in Russia was a wonderful experience, not least of all because it was technically, very, very interesting, but also working with these international groups, whether it be Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, China, or Russia, was fascinating in itself. There was a cultural ingredient in the fascination alongside the technological.”

Martin adds: “What appealed to them about our work is that they could get a useful satellite into orbit, on a 50^th of a budget that they would be spending if they were trying to do it the conventional way.”

Martin explains that advances in miniaturisation has impacted satellite technology in the same way as mobile phone and other computing devices, starting out very large, shrinking very small, almost too small to be useful, before then growing again. He explains: “We started out with washing machine size satellites, then our customers said they wanted to get more pictures down from them, or have more communications capacity, and so we need more power and made the satellite a bit bigger. The satellites gradually grew from the size of a washing machine to the size of one of the huge American-style fridges, or possibly the size of a mini car.

Martin explains where the space debris field is: “The space debris field is concentrated in a band between 700 kilometres and 1000 kilometres above the surface of the Earth. That is the area where we have the international space station, a little bit below that, but around about there.  From 600 to 900 kilometres, that’s the Goldilocks band; the ideal place to put Earth observation satellites, any higher then the cameras get too big.  So, if you’ve got a lot of junk in there that’s a real risk to those satellites.”

He continues: “Everybody who launches anything is potentially adding to space debris. It’s a real problem, and in fact, one of our satellites which we built for the French MOD, back in 1996, was hit by a piece of space debris.  We managed to recover it, work out what had happened and were able to identify the specific piece of space debris that had hit it; it turned out that it was a bit of French space debris, so, the arguments over whose fault it evaporated! That was the first recorded collision in space where the satellite lived to tell the tale. It woke us up to the real risk of space debris, which is present but not until recently, has been something that happens very frequently.”

Martin says that much of the problem is when defunct satellites fragment. He explains: “It’s not the numbers of satellites that represent the risk, it’s when they fragment, either deliberately or accidentally. In recent years we’ve seen so-called mega-constellations, where thousands of satellites are being launched, by themselves, they don’t themselves represent a big hazard, but should they fragment for any reason into thousands of parts, then it creates a big risk.”

There is growing pressure on the industry to clear up the debris either by ensuring they come down to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere, move out into a safe orbit so that they don’t represent a hazard to other users, or to identify and remove hazardous pieces of space debris.  Martin adds: “We did a project a couple of years ago now to launch a satellite and demonstrate how we could grapple a piece of space junk and bring it back down into the atmosphere and burn it up, so, that we can act as the sort of celestial dustmen. We’re not going to be able to clean up the whole of space because there are literally millions of pieces less than the size of a golf ball whizzing around, but there are a few large objects which might represent a hazard if they were to break up and it is realistic to go and capture those and bring them down into orbit to reduce the space junk field.

“To put it into perspective, because of the radar tracking by the US and others, our satellites warn us when there is a piece of space junk coming close. We get a warning once or twice a week that some piece of space junk is coming within 100 metres of our satellite. Then, once every few months, we might have to think about making a manoeuvre to nudge ourselves out of the way, just to give a bit more space. So, it’s a real threat and if we make it worse, it will become an economic threat, particularly to the huge investments going into the mega-constellations who can’t possibly afford to risk space debris damage.”

Martin first met Elon Musk when he was interested in putting a greenhouse on Mars and it was suggested he speak to Martin. Elon became aware that the problem was not so much the greenhouse but how to get it to Mars. Martin says: “I gave him some suggestions and that time we had a good working relationship with our Russian rocket folk, and he went over there, but he didn’t really get on with that approach. He then decided to start SpaceX to provide affordable launches because he saw that clearly was going to be the bottleneck in the small satellite business.  There is no point in building a satellite for a fraction of the cost if it costs you ten times as much to launch the thing, so, he needed to have a low-cost launch. That’s how it all kicked off. Later, after some years and getting SpaceX going, he then became an investor in SSTL for three years or thereabouts, while he was thinking about first rockets and then the communication satellites.”

“I got to know him pretty well. He’s a very interesting character, very driven, very focused, extremely imaginative and exceptionally capable as well, technically. What he’s done since for the launcher industry is absolutely amazing, he’s made the biggest change in the launch industry that we’ve seen in 20 years; quite a revolution.”

Martin also highlights two other influential people he has met or sought out when he needed advice, including Arthur Clarke and Ralph Benjamin who worked at GCHQ and invented the computer mouse. Ralph helped provide some investment towards Martin’s very first satellite.

Asked how the technology that Martin has introduced over the last decade has impacted the way society communicates, he says: “The big society shifts are bringing the peoples of the Earth together in communications and providing visibility of the Earth and what we’re doing to it. When we started there was no internet and some of the first projects we did was to provide electronic communications using these satellites in a sort of ‘flying mailbox’ mode around the world allowing remote communities to communicate with each other.  For example, one of our satellites was providing ‘electronic mail’ to remote midwives in Africa and linking them to doctors in Europe. That was one thing that made me realise that satellites shrunk the world. That’s accelerated now with satellite broadband and everything else, but that was the beginning. Over the last 20 years, it’s brought everybody in touch in a way that fundamentally has changed our perception of the world and how it works.”

He also points to the use of satellite technology in allowing us to develop greater observation of the Earth, climate, urban development etc. He adds: “We can monitor what we’re doing to the earth, how we’re affecting it, how we can extract useful things out of it in a sustainable way and also, hopefully now, as we start to look at how we’re going to change our behaviour, we need to monitor and see if our behavioural changes are actually working in the right direction. We want to avoid any unintended consequences of what we think are good ideas now.”

For those looking at space and technology as a career option, Martin advises: “Whatever you do, do it because you’re interested in it. You’re going to spend your life on something so, if you’re in the fortunate position of being able to choose what you want to do, whatever, it is, choose something that is fascinating to some extent, something that really excites you.  Then when it doesn’t work, as it won’t at times, and when things go hard and don’t pan out, if you have that underlying fascination and interest, you will see it through, and hopefully, it will be rewarding as well.”

Asked what the next ten years hold for satellite technology, Martin points to the advances of the last two decades which have seen advances in materials, microelectronics and robotics.

“We are already beginning to see the change of space from what is being called ‘new space’, which is the microsatellite end to what I call ‘next space’, which is where we will take advantage of robotics. This will allow us to first of all assemble satellites in orbit, like Lego. We will launch modules and then robotically assemble them into much bigger satellites than we can squeeze into a rocket.  We’ve just seen the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is all folded up, squeezed into the biggest rocket envelope that we currently have; how are we going to build the next one, which is even bigger?  The only way to do that is to assemble it in orbit, like Lego.

“The next step after in-orbit assembly is in-orbit manufacture, where, if you want to think of it very simply, we launch a 3D printer with raw ingredients and you manufacture your satellite in orbit. That allows you to build much larger satellites which will also us to look more deeply into the universe, look back at Earth with more precision, provide higher communications capability, possibly even generate solar power in orbit and beam it down to the Earth.  We will also use robotics to help clean up space debris.

“We won’t then need to have all the facilities and test facilities and manufacturing facilities on Earth. This is going to have a dramatic impact on the terrestrial space industry because it will move from the Earth out into orbit and that’s going to be very, very different.

“Then from Earth orbit, as we go back to the Moon and we have prolonged human habitation on the Moon, we will need robotic capability to construct all the habitats, rather like on the Antarctic, in order to support human presence. Robotics will allow us to do that safely. Interestingly, that technology will then feedback into the terrestrial business. For example, if we have robots in space assembling the satellites and assembling the habitats on the Moon, we can then use that experience to produce better robots on Earth which will reduce the hazards that we see in the terrestrial construction industry.”

Martin says that he tends not to dwell on his achievements, he adds: “I don’t want it sound trite, but that’s not why I did it. I did it all because I was interested, and it’s very kind that people think that what’s been done is useful and helpful and I get the awards, I’m very grateful for them, I appreciate them, but I don’t tend to sit and sort of dwell on them.  Having said that, the one that stands out was receiving a knighthood. It was special because it came from the space industry recognising something which, when we started, was considered, at best to be a waste of time back in the 1980s.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by TP Transcription

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley