SSTL to build spacecraft for private space telescope
Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL), a British company best known for developing small satellites, will help build a large, privately funded space telescope.
SSTL announced March 9 it had been selected by Schmidt Sciences to provide the spacecraft platform for Lazuli, a space telescope with a primary mirror larger than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. The platform will be responsible for attitude control, propulsion and communications for the telescope.
Schmidt Sciences, founded by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy Schmidt, announced in January plans to build Lazuli as part of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System, which also includes three ground-based observatories. Lazuli, scheduled to launch as soon as mid-2028, will feature a primary mirror three meters across.
At the time Schmidt Sciences announced Lazuli, during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix, officials with the organization said they had identified vendors for key spacecraft components but declined to identify any of the companies involved.
The 40-year-old SSTL is best known as one of the early manufacturers of small satellites in an era when most companies focused on larger spacecraft. The company has built more than 70 spacecraft over the years for Earth observation, navigation, communications and other applications.
The company argues that the approach it has used to develop innovative small satellites can also be applied to a large space telescope.
"While SSTL is known for small satellites, ‘small' has always described our approach, not the size of the satellite," said Andrew Cawthorne, managing director of SSTL, in a statement.
"Lazuli demonstrates that the small-satellite approach - rapid development, pragmatic engineering and intelligent reuse of commercial parts and proven technologies - can be applied to much larger and more ambitious missions, including deep-space observatories," the company said.
Schmidt Sciences said when it announced Lazuli that it planned to streamline development by performing final assembly of the spacecraft near its Florida launch site and relying on off-the-shelf components with previous spaceflight heritage.
The organization has not revealed other companies working on the mission, but a chart displayed at the briefing announcing Lazuli indicated the mission would launch from a Cape Canaveral pad currently used by Relativity Space, the launch company whose chief executive is Eric Schmidt.
SSTL did not disclose the value of the Lazuli contract. Schmidt Sciences said at the January announcement that the overall cost of the mission is expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, about one-tenth the cost of a typical NASA flagship astrophysics mission.
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