Oxford Space Systems Opens a New Facility in Abingdon
Oxford Space Systems has opened a new manufacturing facility in Abingdon, Oxfordshire to support its ambitious growth plans.
The primary objective of this new facility is to scale up internal capability to manufacture in-house key materials and components of our deployable antennas. This will accelerate the company’s industrialisation plan to deliver batches of antennas for our customers’ satellite constellation programmes.
Our deployable antennas, such as the Wrapped Rib for Synthetic Aperture Radar, have components and materials that require specific quality controlled processes, i.e., metal mesh for reflector surface and composite materials for both primary and secondary reflector support structures. In-house production of metal mesh for the primary reflector surface has already been established at our Harwell facility (with support from the ESA ARTES co-funding programme) in 2021. The new facility at Abingdon will allow us to expand our lightweight material processing capability and takes advantage of new equipment purchased by Oxford Space Systems over the past year to support the industrialisation plan. Establishing an internal capability for batch production of large scale antennas is key to maintaining control of component manufacturing in order to deliver our products at the highest quality and within the timescales required by our customers