Authors: Elena Vrabie and Bogdan Iordache
Space exploration has quietly become the backbone of modern life. Over the past few decades, it has evolved beyond rocket launches to shape the tools we use every day, including GPS for navigation, satellites for weather forecasting, and telecommunications.
We rely on space technology without even realizing it in agriculture, transportation, medicine, and finance, and its role is only set to scale. As satellites begin to be built with assembly-line efficiency, they will serve as “just another data stream you’re using to make decisions,” says Dr. Adrian Dumitrescu, co-founder of ROSPIN (the Romanian Space Initiative), AIM Space, and Mission Design Engineer at Astera Institute.
Adrian is working on pushing satellite technology toward a smarter and more sustainable future. With a PhD from the University of Southampton in the design and testing of multifunctional satellite structures, his research spans additive manufacturing, 3D printing, orbital debris shielding, hypervelocity impacts, and design for demise. Currently a Mission Design Engineer at the Astera Institute – a U.S. nonprofit where he is designing a mission to Mars – and previously part of Astroscale, a leader in on-orbit servicing, Adrian has a rare vantage point on how satellites are built, used, and discarded.
“The way we use satellites today is a bit like going to work, using your laptop, then throwing it in the bin at the end of the day and buying a new one tomorrow,” he says. “It’s not efficient.” That lack of sustainability is what drives him. Through ROSPIN and AIM Space, Adrian aims not only to build the next generation of demisable, reusable satellite designs, but also to bring together the next generation of space engineers in Eastern Europe.
In this interview, he explains how satellite data is already becoming common data, highlighting Eastern Europe’s opportunity to build CubeSats and robotic in-orbit servicing, and underscores the continent’s push for space sustainability as satellites shift from customized systems to mass-produced platforms, driving both industry and policy.
Underline Ventures: Many people think space tech is far away from their daily lives. Can you share a few ways we’ve already been relying on satellite and space missions’ intel?
Adrian Dumitrescu: Satellite data is used for any important decision at a global level, from war surveillance to satellite internet in remote areas, and navigating in the city. If, for example, we want to take care of our crops and improve our agricultural practices, we will need satellite data.
There are a lot of technology transfers that have happened in the past 30-40 years through NASA that people might not be aware of: solar panels were initially invented for satellite use, the miniaturization of cameras initially happened for use on the International Space Station (ISS), the same with insulation design, and even wireless headphones.
A trend I am seeing is that big companies – like Amazon and Google – will have their own satellite constellation, which will lower the cost even more. Satellite data is going to become such an ordinary tool, another data stream that you are using to make decisions.
In the EU and especially the countries that are part of the European Space Agency (ESA), we have free access to all the data produced by satellites developed with funding from ESA member states. Data is already out there; we just need data aggregators, companies that are able to get something out of it.
Actually, with AIM Space, we’re mostly looking at Earth Observation (EO) Data Insights. The downstream aspect of the space sector is easier to start from, because you don’t need the infrastructure.
We started with some agriculture case studies and are discussing with local governments how space data can help in the energy sector as well. The satellites are out there, the data is out there.
UV: Satellites have tripled in number over the past few years, and launches will keep scaling up. What’s changed most in their design and purpose compared to a decade ago, and do you know of any tradeoffs?
AD: It’s not necessarily the satellite design itself that has changed dramatically; the standards in space are really high, but the production infrastructure around it. Previously, if you wanted to build a satellite, you would have to go to 10 different suppliers to get 10 different parts.
Over the last decade or so, most satellites designed and produced have been internet satellites. We went from zero satellites to 90% of them being the same. Companies like SpaceX approached this from a car production line perspective. They wanted to make them cheap and fast to produce. They had a big upfront cost to develop the first platform, but then they had everything in-house. They optimize to reduce the cost, and they have the advantage of producing the launcher as well.
These satellites don’t have a long lifetime, 3-4 years, so most of them operate in low Earth orbit (LEO), at altitudes of 300-400 kilometers above Earth, so it is better to make them cheaply. Generally, what makes a space system expensive is redundancy: if you want to make sure it’s going to work for a long time, you’re just going to put two of everything on it.
UV: Can you walk us through a satellite end-of-life disposal process?
AD: Working at Astroscale, I discovered that some of these satellites will have enough fuel on board to make it to re-entry at the end of their life, in a specific area of the Pacific Ocean, in a controlled way. However, when they run into problems and are not controllable, that’s when you have to send another satellite to somehow grab it, potentially with a robotic arm or a similar system.
But there are many complexities there, because these large satellites have big solar panels, and you have to make sure you don’t hit them. You also don’t know where their center of mass is, and how it has changed, which is going to affect the way you grab it and bring it down.
From now on, satellites are all going to have a dedicated capture interface, so you can grab onto them. The next challenge is to make that interface universal, kind of a USBC of space, because everybody wants to push their own standard.
UV: Europe is pushing strongly on space sustainability with initiatives like the ESA’s “Zero Debris”. From your perspective, what’s shining in Europe right now in terms of satellite innovation or regulation?
AD: I might be a bit biased, because I worked in the in-orbit servicing industry at Astroscale, and I contributed a few points to the Zero Debris Technical Booklet, the annex to the “Zero Debris Charter”, but I think Europe is at the forefront of in-orbit servicing and space sustainability, both from an engineering and a policy perspective. ESA is investing in many different projects, one of which is Astroscale’s ELSA-M (End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-Multiple) demonstration, which is trying to bring down OneWeb satellite, the second-largest constellation in the world after Starlink.
There are other massive satellites out there that are coming to the end of their lives, and they have not been designed with sustainability in mind; they are a big threat to the space environment. So ESA has put up another invitation to tender for companies to go and remove these kinds of bus-sized satellites. This is complex engineering, and I feel like they are doing it more than the US or other countries, like India and China, which have also had a few recent breakthroughs, but not active or structured removal missions.
It’s important to understand how ESA missions work. Whether it’s financing your mission, or at least part of it, ESA will have a big say in the conditions your platform has to meet to be launched. Every project right now has stringent space sustainability aspects to it, so it becomes more difficult for companies to produce those platforms, and there is this gap where you have to “bite the bullet” and opt for a more expensive platform for a while.
Europe is behind the US, India, and China in other areas, such as planetary exploration, launcher development, and human exploration, but there’s always going to be a balance. The UK, France, and Germany are taking the leadership role in terms of space sustainability, and it feels like the US is causing most of the issues because they are launching the most.
UV: You’ve also worked on hypervelocity impacts. Can you paint a quick picture of what happens when debris hits a satellite?
AD: The main thing to remember from high school physics is that kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared, so even a very light thing can produce a lot of energy. It’s important to try and visualize what that speed is, first of all. If we are talking about LEO satellites, they orbit at 7 kilometers per second, which is roughly 10 times faster than a bullet. The main thing that happens is that tiny projectiles will produce a significant energy discharge, causing much larger craters than their original size.
If these space debris elements are bigger than a few centimeters in diameter, we can track them with ground telescopes and space observatories, and map where they are so that you can move around them. But when they’re a few millimeters to a centimeter in size, they are big enough to destroy your satellite, but too small to be tracked.
For context, the International Space Station can stop debris up to about one and a half centimeters, so its shielding is pretty hefty because it has humans on board. But it’s not the case with satellites. My PhD proposed the idea that we should have dedicated shielding for satellites because the debris field is increasing. 3D printing can open the design space to accommodate both structural and shielding functions.
We are probably going to reach the point where a satellite structural design revolution will happen, but additive manufacturing technology needs very thin walls to be printed.
UV: How do concepts like Design for Demise (D4D) change the way engineers approach satellite design, and can you share your knowledge about cost-effective manufacturing? Could 3D printing help close some gaps?
AD: In essence, with D4D, you are trying to make satellites safer, easier to dispose of, and more reliable overall. At the end of their life, most satellites will have to eventually re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up. If they are designed poorly, they won’t burn up, and they might hit someone on the head. This has happened before*.
The trade-off with the processes of making satellites break up easily is that they usually add mass and complexity to the platform. We need more integrated subsystem design. Instead of thinking of different components with different functionalities as separate, we design them together.
Part of my PhD looked at that. I don’t think we’re there yet. From my perspective, I think 3D printing is definitely one of the technologies that could be an enabler for this, especially metal 3D printing, because plastics are less likely to be used on a satellite.
At the end of the day, if you can’t prove that your satellite will re-enter effectively, then you need to carry more fuel on board to make sure it re-enters at a certain spot on Earth, which is expensive. So, there’s a big policy push to improve the design of bigger satellites to be demisable, like making the joints between different structural panels break up easier, but that means adding more mass to each joint, or having demisable tanks.
These components are mission-critical, so there is a lot more research and testing that needs to go on. With the space industry, you need to build confidence. If you are a satellite integrator or developer and you’re looking for components to put on your satellite, if they haven’t flown already, they are unlikely to fly on a platform. So it becomes difficult to test and demonstrate new components in orbit.
[*Ed. Note: List of space debris fall incidents]
UV: Can you tell us a bit about ROSPIN-SAT-1, which will cover Romanian vegetation and forests? What excites you most about this mission, and what lessons can we all take from it?
AD: This is a small satellite project, the size of a two-liter water bottle, which was started a few years ago by a group of students from the Polytechnic University in Bucharest. The goal of the mission is to look at vegetation, at forests and deforestation issues in Romania, and identify areas from a distance that have a potential for reforestation. The second objective is to make our platform open source, so students, young professionals, or companies can run their own experiments in orbit along with us.
We have hit a few important milestones along the way. In late 2022, we were accepted as part of the ESA program called “Fly Your Satellite! Design Booster”, where six teams were selected – five of them from Western Europe and ours – to advance the design, get access to experts, and give us a stamp of approval.
We won some funding from the government in Romania, a couple of years back, to purchase some components. And we are now kind of approaching finalizing our satellite design. We have also equipped our own lab to start working with these components in a controlled environment, because otherwise it’s not safe. We are hoping to join the next stage of this satellite program from ESA and fly the mission in a couple of years.
It’s a big learning exercise for us. We are not reinventing the wheel. The satellite itself is not a novel thing anymore; the best part is getting a team of students to work through these very complex problems and get used to the standard of the space industry. A lot of our leadership team has already joined the space industry in Romania; they are proven professionals. We have been working hard, especially for the past one and a half years, trying to raise the money through crowdfunding to send this into orbit.
UV: You’ve recently joined Astera Institute as a Mission Design Engineer. Can you tell us more about what you will be doing in the next year? What is a mission concept and a technology roadmap for Mars?
AD: Space mission design is related to systems engineering and sizing up systems that could achieve a certain mission. As a mission design engineer, I am trying to bring all the elements together – structure, power, payloads, maybe cameras, whatever it is – to achieve our goal, and see how these could fit into a box that’s not too big, not too heavy, and not too expensive. Then you iterate.
The beauty of space mission design is that it works in a spiral. Every decision you make impacts everything else. You have to design everything at once and then refine. You can’t pick one thing and then move to the next; it’s not a waterfall process.
At the Astera Institute, we are working on the basic technology to potentially warm up Mars with the goal of terraforming the planet. This has three main steps. The first one is warming up the planet by about 30 degrees, which could start melting subsurface ice. Then, we want to increase the oxygen level, followed by the third step, which is to increase the atmospheric pressure. The current conditions on Mars (temperature, pressure, and oxygen level) are not suitable for human life at the moment.
For the first step, we are thinking of releasing some nanoparticles into Mars’ atmosphere that can trap the heat generated by the planet. My colleagues are working on a reverse tech mission for Earth to fight global warming. This would increase its temperature in only a few years by 30 to 35 degrees.
My role is to look at the first mission that could demonstrate some of these technologies, which ideally happens in the next five to seven years. Once we have demonstrated this, it’s a global decision whether we do it or not, because first we need to learn more about Mars and whether it has life currently or not, before we do anything to change the planet as a whole.
UV: Imagine you were to receive €10 million today to build just one or two space tech testbeds that aren’t flashy but solve real problems. What would you build and why?
AD: Looking at Eastern Europe and Romania more precisely, the first thing I would do is build the hardware facilities and manufacturing line for producing small satellite platforms – CubeSats. There is definitely room on the market, as there are companies that will want to build their own constellations. We already see companies in Bulgaria doing this, and they are not even within ESA*.
Another thing would be in-orbit servicing for space sustainability. I have worked in the industry, and there are a few facilities where you can test in-orbit servicing elements – satellites talking to each other, navigating off of each other, automation in space – it’s a robotics-heavy area that Romania or Eastern Europe could excel at.
[*Ed. Note: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, and Malta have Cooperation Agreements with ESA.]
