Professor Sir Martin Sweeting, executive chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) and director of the Surrey Space Centre, seems always to have done his own thing, regardless of what people thought and said.
When most young boys were playing with action figures, kicking about their football or riding their bikes, a five-year-old Sweeting was fascinated by the world of electronics and communications.
“That somehow really caught my imagination,” he says. “It was the idea of being able to communicate. I have no idea why it fascinated me, but it did.”
Born in 1951 to parents whose jobs were a world away from electrical engineering – his mother was an artist and his father a writer, poet and estate manager – Sweeting was very much alone in his interest, but that didn’t stop him pursuing it. And what started with making telephones out of string and baked-bean cans gradually developed into an interest in radio and eventually satellites.
In later life Sweeting went on to set up university spin-out firm SSTL, which is now owned by EADS Astrium, and has become the world’s leading small-satellite company. With his strong team, which has reached 340 people in SSTL and 100 academic researchers in the University of Surrey’s Surrey Space Centre, he has to date designed, manufactured and launched 34 satellites.
With a knighthood now under his belt to acknowledge his impressive achievements, which he says came from ideas that most people thought of as a “form of lunacy”, it is not surprising that he is proud that he has proved people wrong.
He says: “When I was given a knighthood it wasn’t something I was particularly hankering after, but it was recognition by the industry of having achieved something against all the odds. That was a proud moment.”
When Sweeting went to Surrey University to do BSc and PhD degrees in electrical and electronic engineering, the plan was to study the subject to help him get a career in radio. But in the late 1960s historic events changed all that: the Apollo moon landings. Sweeting suddenly became fascinated with space and his interest in satellites began. His fascination continued to grow when he saw the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
He says: “This was a very inspiring film. I think that made the transition from being interested in radio – building equipment and talking to people – to going a bit further and looking at space.
“The whole concept of space fascinated me. Not so much looking at stars, but it was more the exploration and the communications in space that caught my imagination.”
Sweeting says his interest in satellites also developed at a time when the idea of communicating around the world was “exciting” and “exotic”.
“I remember in those days space was very exotic,” he says. “You didn’t have the internet and telephones were incredibly expensive, so the opportunity to talk to a whole range of people all over the world was pretty exotic. Now we don’t think twice of it, but it was a different world then. That was a really exciting time.”
Building on his interest in satellite communications at Surrey, Sweeting built a ground tracking station on the university campus so that he could listen to the American and Russian weather satellites. This was just around the time that the first microcomputers had been made available, which meant that for the first time it was possible to automate something using low power. It was then that Sweeting had an idea – an idea that would change his life. The idea was to build a small satellite. Instead of space companies building and using expensive big satellites, Sweeting thought of using the latest microelectronics to shrink the technology and develop small satellites that could be just as powerful, but built at much lower cost.
While, he says, most people thought this idea was lunacy, thankfully Surrey University was willing to give him a chance. And, much against everyone’s expectations, Sweeting set up a lab at the university with a group of volunteers to build a small satellite, UoSat-1. He then persuaded Nasa to launch the finished satellite, free of charge, on the back of one of its rockets in 1981 – something he thinks of as a highlight in his life.
“It was a very exciting moment,” he says. “Watching an enormous rocket carry something you’ve made into space is pretty exciting. There was an element of pride, but it was more satisfaction and excitement, tinged with a bit of nervousness. To everyone’s amazement, it got finished, it got launched, and it actually worked.”
The satellite would go on to work in orbit for eight years before re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. Nasa was so pleased with the success of UoSat-1 that it told Sweeting there was a spare slot on one of its rockets scheduled to fly six months later. Sweeting and his team then worked day and night to build a second satellite, UoSat-2, to meet the deadline. Twenty six years on and the satellite is still working today.
He says: “It sort of demonstrated that this wasn’t just a one off, it wasn’t just a fluke. We were starting to show that the application of modern microelectronics could actually do something useful.”
Sweeting says he has a lot to thank Surrey University for, including allowing him to work on such projects. At the time when Sweeting starting studying there, Surrey was a new university so did not have a reputation to maintain. This is something that he says worked in his favour.
“I fell on fertile ground,” he says. “The university to their great credit said this is pretty wacky but we’ll give it a go. I think it was because they were a new university and they didn’t have any reputation to lose. They instead had a reputation to make. Had I tried to do this in a more established university I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to.”
When Margaret Thatcher put an end to the UK national space programme, Sweeting knew that future space projects at the university would be difficult and funding would be hard to come by. It was then in 1985 that he decided to take a risk and venture into the world of business. STTL was born.
He says: “It was clear that we weren’t really going to get any funding and if we were going to continue to make any more satellites we had to do it on a proper basis. So that’s when we set up the company.”
Sweeting says that setting up the company was relatively simple. It was managing SSTL from inside the university that was the difficult bit, with the company operating on just £100 share capital for the first 10 years by engaging in positive cash-flow contracts. Today, a university spin-out company is something that is accepted and appreciated in business and academia, but back then this wasn’t the case.
He says: “These days this is fairly fashionable, but in the early 1980s having an industrial activity in the university was considered pretty grubby. It was going somewhat against the grain.”
Also, for the first 15 years of the company’s life, Sweeting says, despite its success, his satellites were regarded just as interesting research projects. People were saying that it was fantastic what they could do, but they weren’t particularly useful.
It wasn’t until 2000, when the company became involved in a project called the Disaster Monitoring Constellation, that Sweeting and his team really got to show off the potential of his small satellites. The project brought a number of countries together to build a series of small earth observation satellites that could enable a fast response to natural disasters.
“That was really the first time that these small satellites were shown to be operationally useful,” he says. “That was the swap from them just being an interesting toy to actually being a useful product.
“We had a satellite the size of a table doing the same thing as a satellite the size of a London bus and with a corresponding reduction in cost,” he adds. “Our satellites were costing a few million as opposed to a few hundred million. We were having almost a 100 to one reduction in price and yet they were starting to produce data that I think was comparable. That was a big achievement.”
Sweeting says that SSTL grew slowly and organically by reinvesting profits rather than introducing investors – until its acquisition by EADS Astrium in 2009. But growing the business to the global phenomenon it is now was not planned. In fact, Sweeting says he never had any plans to grow SSTL, as it was something that concerned him. Even during the smaller expansions of the company Sweeting says he got nervous and, despite the firm’s success, he still has reservations about it growing today.
“I don’t want it to grow just for the sake of growing,” he says. “In fact, we have never grown just because we want to be bigger. I didn’t set out with the view that I wanted to build a company. I set out with a view that I wanted to build spacecraft and I wanted them to be useful and I thought this was a neat idea. The rest just happened.”
SSTL was sold to EADS Astrium when the company grew to a size that was too big for Surrey University to manage. It was crucial to find a company that would make the right parent shareholder to replace the university. Sweeting says he didn’t want SSTL to lose its identity and uniqueness, while maintaining its links to the university.
He says: “The university said we have something unique – we want to maintain that unique flavour. We have got a different business model to the way the space industry normally works and we don’t want to lose that.”
The sale of SSTL to EADS Astrium became the biggest single cash spin-out of any university company in the UK. A couple of years on and Sweeting couldn’t be happier with how things have worked out.
“Of all the people that came forward, it turned out that EADS came up with the right guarantees, the right interests, and what we believe were the right motivations,” he says. “We’re now two and a bit years in and I have to say they have done exactly what was on the tin. They lived up to what they said they would do and it’s been a very productive and happy relationship.”
Apart from being able to take on bigger projects and having to explain things at board level in a certain understandable way, Sweeting says life as part of the larger organisation really is not that different. He says that EADS Astrium has let SSTL carry on working in more or less the same way as before, which is something that it should be commended for.
“When large companies buy small companies, the history is actually not good,” he says. “That is something which we were nervous about at the time. They usually come in and say, well, actually, we know how to run your business. And of course that’s the death of them.
“If you looked around the company and said what is different now as to three years ago – there is no difference,” he adds. “We are now doing things which we couldn’t do before in terms of project size. But how we do it hasn’t changed.”
Despite his success with EADS Astrium, Sweeting is still incredibly thankful for the time and effort that Surrey University gave SSTL before the ownership of the company changed hands.
“They stuck with it for 20 years,” he says. “At times when it didn’t look like it was going to be a very commercial idea they kept the faith and they didn’t lose their nerve and sell it off during times when it didn’t look like we may not get business.”
Sweeting says he didn’t expect SSTL to be anywhere near as successful as it is today. Looking back, one of the reasons for its success, he says, has been down to his passion for space communications and building satellites, rather than just wanting to make lots of cash.
“I didn’t start out saying I want to make £1 million,” he says. “I started out saying this is a really interesting idea, let’s pursue it. Money is important, but it is not everything.”
In looking to the future, Sweeting says he doesn’t want SSTL to grow as one big firm. Instead, he sees the company developing a series of smaller firms within it.
He says: “We just don’t want to grow and be a bigger company, so I think what we will end up with will be little sub-companies which specialise in different things. We want to maintain our influence in this market because we were the pioneers and still, I think, are the market leaders.”
Inspiring icons: Schumacher, Williams, Head and Byrne
After such a lengthy career in motorsport, it comes as no surprise to find that Ross Brawn has worked with some talented and flamboyant characters along the way. And some of his contemporaries have acted as real inspirations.
Frank Williams, as the man who gave him his break in motor racing, comes high on that list. But Brawn says it was Patrick Head, co-founder of the Williams F1 team, who really helped drive him on to success. “Frank was an inspiration, yes, but probably more so was Patrick Head who was the chief engineer. Patrick set very high standards. He was a very pragmatic, solid and precise engineer, both in his engineering solutions and in his approach.”
Rory Byrne, chief designer at Ferrari, is cited as another major influence on his career. Brawn and Byrne worked together for the best part of a decade at the Italian F1 team and that partnership was instrumental in helping Michael Schumacher to deliver five consecutive Drivers’ titles.
“Byrne was a hugely creative person but he wasn’t the most practical,” recalls Brawn. “He and I worked well together because I often brought a practical bias to what we were doing.
“Most of my reference points come from within motor racing and I’ve met some hugely creative but perhaps not so practical people, while others are hugely practical and not so creative. I’ve always been fascinated by how the chemistry of that works to build a group of people.”
It’s no surprise to find that, of all the drivers Brawn has worked with during his long career, it is Schumacher who has made the biggest impact on him. The pair won their first F1 race and their first championship together. Brawn says that it has been a truly special working relationship.
“He’s a very determined person,” says Brawn. “He’s very focused on what he’s doing. He also has a very good understanding of engineering. His father supported him through his early racing career but Michael had to look after the car himself and was used to getting grease under his fingernails.
“He still loves to do that. His son is racing and Michael mechanics his car for him.
“He enjoys that side of things and I believe that empathy with engineering helps you become a top-line driver.”