When you think of New Hampshire, a rapidly growing space economy might not immediately come to mind. The University of New Hampshire is aiming to change that perception with the launch of the region’s first Space Technology Hub.
The new facility promises to provide state-of-the-art expertise and equipment for the burgeoning commercial space industry, marking a significant step forward in the Northeast’s space sector. It also aims to foster a new generation of space professionals by creating a student-to-workforce pipeline through training opportunities.
The hub builds on the university’s history of collaboration with NASA and other agencies, during which university researchers have been involved in more than 100 space and rocket missions.
Réka Winslow, the director of the Space Technology Hub, said that the idea for the hub originated during her work on the iMap low instrument: a $3 million device developed for NASA’s iMap IMF mission that will help researchers better understand the heliosphere, a bubble surrounding and protecting our solar system. The project encountered many challenges, including supply chain issues and the obsolescence of earlier parts.
“As we were going through some of these challenges, I was wondering, how does the commercial space sector deal with these?” she said. “Do they have these challenges as well? What do they do to fix these?”
After reaching out to those in the commercial space sector, Winslow learned that, while they faced similar challenges, there were others as well. She noticed a lack of accessible and affordable solutions for companies to access space-testing services, with many companies facing extensive waitlists and travel time to use these types of facilities.
David Hertzler, systems engineer at UNH’s Space Science Center, shows a display that celebrates the university’s longstanding involvement in NASA missions. (Photo by Sadaf Tokhi, NH Public Radio)
She also suspected that many of the university’s skilled engineers could help fill gaps in the private sector.
“We have a lot of fantastic resources within the university from the space science side that weren’t available to the commercial enterprise up until now,” Winslow said. “So, we connect those resources (to) build the space economy here in New Hampshire (and) help these new companies.”
She says to think of the hub as a collaboration center, where both academia and the commercial sector work together and mutually benefit.
One Hanover-based engineering firm, Creare, has already been using the facilities to work on space instruments destined for a mission to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in 2028.
Lucas O’Neill, a research and development engineer at Creare, said the test was quite challenging to conduct. Although there are companies nationwide that offer this service, the team found that the Space and Technology Hub had the ideal facilities and expertise for their needs, and being local was an added advantage.
“They really understood our requirements,” he said.
“They had the facilities and the qualifications for those facilities that matched up with what we needed. It just seemed like a really good fit.”
The hub’s launch event in late July showcased some of its equipment that can simulate conditions in space like a thermal vacuum chamber and an anechoic chamber.
The launch event also introduced the engineers and specialists who bring decades of mission expertise to the table, like Stanley Ellis, a research project engineer at UNH’s Space Science Center.
Ellis started working at UNH as a physics student and has over 30 years of experience. He fondly recalled standing under the 17-ton shuttle Atlantis, getting to work on it and follow it across the country to its launch. He says many people are unaware of New Hampshire’s longstanding role in space sciences.
“Frequently when I talk to people about what we do here at the Space Science Center, they say, ‘Really? I had no idea you were building spacecraft here at UNH,’” he said. “So, it’s really great for Réka to put the hub together, to get word out that this is what we do and this is what we can do. We have a lot of expertise, and we can share it with the industry and do even more great things.”
David Hertzler, a systems engineer at UNH’s Space Science Center, said there are advantages to having such a facility with state-of-the-art capabilities here in New Hampshire.
“You don’t have to go out to visit a NASA center to do this testing,” he said. “To be able to do it in your own facility, to be able to fix something that you found right away and then get it back out … helps us to be so much more competitive, so much faster and innovate better.”
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