If space is the final frontier,  Ben Taylor is the technician on the ground getting New Zealand there.

Taylor is a senior research fellow and spacecraft engineering lead at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland’s Space Institute – Te Pūnaha Ātea.  He calls himself a “jack of all trades” – if the trades in question have to do with space missions. A physicist and engineer, he has been part of designing, developing and deploying multiple satellites, payloads and spacecraft subsystems in the UK.

Since he came to New Zealand in December 2020, Taylor has been working to set up the infrastructure necessary to fulfil the institute’s vision.

Taylor is working to set up three interrelated facilities where satellites will be built and tested.

The Fabrication and Assembly Facility, or FAF, doesn’t look like much yet but Taylor hasn’t been faffing about. He’s been doing the early process work of setting up a mechanical and electronics workshop where space hardware will be developed.

Taylor is also leading the setup of a clean room, where the actual satellites, payloads and subsystems – will be built “for real” without the contaminants that could ruin them.

 Finally, he’s working with Frank May, the National Satellite Test Facility lead, to install testing facilities, where the hardware can be subjected to conditions that mimic space.

When you picture a satellite, do you imagine a large machine with huge solar panel ‘wings’? Try again. Picture a small tissue box, one of those cube-shaped ones.

A one-unit (1U) nanosatellite is about the size of a small tissue box with a one-litre volume, though heavier, with a weight of about 1.3 kg. Three units of the same size stuck together are 3U, about the size of a loaf of bread. Te Pūnaha Ātea’s first mission is likely to be a 3U satellite, while future missions might be 6U or 12U. These sizes are big enough to put in some interesting components and get good image quality but small enough to be relatively quick and cheap to build and launch, says Taylor.

New Zealand’s space sector is expanding rapidly. Its advantages include a time zone that allows satellites to be monitored 24/7 with international cooperation, the agility of a smaller bureaucracy, and sheer human ingenuity. Rocket Lab has emerged as a powerhouse in launching satellites, bringing many into space at a time before deploying them one by one. 

There is, however, a gap when it comes to designing and building satellites in New Zealand, says Taylor. Filling that gap at the University of Auckland will be good for the future of the national space sector because it will allow students from the undergraduate to doctoral level to get invaluable hands-on experience in a field that provides rigorous training by its nature.

“One of the things about building satellites is, once they’re launched, you don’t get to go back and tinker with them,” says Taylor.

“You need to make absolutely sure that whatever you’re flying is going to work even after you’ve had many G’s of vibrational force rattling around your sensitive bits of electronic hardware in every direction and even after it has had prolonged exposure to the harsh space environment. There is the scope for software updates, though, as long as you’ve got a solid foundation. Increasingly, the software side is where a lot of the work is, so people from those disciplines are critical.”

The university could also play an important role in helping space start-ups – including university spinouts – get off the ground figuratively and literally. Part of that help could be in the form of an in-orbit demonstration programme.

Taylor aims to get Te Pūnaha Ātea’s first space mission ready for launch by August or September 2022. The first mission will be primarily about setting up and demonstrating a process that works, he says. It will feature equipment for Earth imaging and the “space selfie stick” to document its success.

The mission will also feature another piece of technology Taylor has helped develop – a system that deploys a thin “sail” of about a square metre. Despite the thinness of the atmosphere, there is drag in space, so at the end of a satellite’s life, a drag sail can be deployed to more quickly pull it into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it burns up.

“We want to be tidy Kiwis,” says Taylor, whose colleagues include Guglielmo Aglietti, who is working on ways to clean up space debris, and Roberto Armellin and Laura Pirovano, who are working on cataloguing space junk and controlling space traffic.

The first Te Pūnaha Ātea space mission is likely to be based on an externally developed platform but the plan is to quickly move towards building spacecraft “from scratch,” says Taylor.

“The first mission is about establishing the process. The second will fly our own electronics and platform systems as a payload. Beyond that, we should be in a position to move to doing everything in-house to meet New Zealand’s needs on a national scale.”