Covid and AI are both concerns – SatNews

By Chris Forrester

Noel Rimalovski, MD, GH Partners, opened Day 2 of Silicon Valley Space Week’s Satellite Innovation section, discussing new trends in satellite manufacturing in a fascinating panel. Mr. Rimalovski polled the audience and 80% of respondents said they believe the Covid pandemic is still having an impact on production and component lead times.

Col. (Ret.) Dean Bellamy, EVP/National Security Space, Redwire, said his experience reflects the trend toward smaller satellites and that the experiences of the last five years have shown the importance of satellite manufacturers becoming aware of their Suppliers could rely on reliability. Another trend was the expectation or even demand for earlier milestone payments.

Chris Winslet, GM of Blue Canyon Technologies, said his key trend is greater use of automation and that cycle times are improving and dramatically reduced. We believe in “intelligent automation”. This makes sense if you produce many, many items. “But if you change your production frequently, be careful and, if possible, be smart about automation.”

John Borrego, vice president of manufacturing at Machina Labs, already uses large robots in his manufacturing processes and in building his structures. He explained that aerospace engineers are a dying generation and automation is essential to fill this gap. “The pandemic forced companies to change their business models as a component that took just weeks before Covid still took months and months to produce. You need to change your mindset and remove the human element if possible, but first you need to fully understand the overall process.”

Karolis Senvaitis, Dir. Kongsberg NanoAvionics, head of engineering operations, is a company that is only ten years old, but he said the integration could be dangerous. “Vertical integration could mean that you would take on all the responsibilities and risks. In many cases, it was better to work with trusted partners.” Automation must start from the design phase through the testing process.

Tim Shroyer, CTO, CPI, builds ground stations, amplifiers and related equipment. “We are building large structures, including those for lunar transport. “The trend we’ve seen is a shift from video to a wider range of traffic to process. We had to keep up with those changes.” Shroyer said he was pleased that CPI was very competitive in most cases when it made its own equipment, “but not always.” You have to be flexible.”

The panel looked at the role of AI in the manufacturing sector and Winslett said his company was trying to understand the entire process, but it was important to know where the production data was coming from. Senvaitis told delegates that he is cautious about AI because of the trustworthiness of the data used. “AI can misinterpret data.” Borrego said they have a team of development engineers who interpret data before using it in AI, but there is still a lot of “trial and error” in creating the data and human Interaction. “But at the moment we are still scratching the surface when it comes to AI, although we are storing all the data we have used for future use.”