A small Glasgow spacecraft engineering company, founded in 2017, that builds satellite electronics and quantum-communications technology.
Craft Prospect is a Glasgow space engineering company with a very specific focus: making satellites smarter and more secure. Its products include a SpaceWire Router, which moves data around inside a spacecraft, a Cloud Detector, and a Forward Looking Imager, which uses a small neural network, a type of artificial intelligence, to look ahead and decide where a satellite should point. It also sells consultancy and has worked on design and operations for missions backed by the UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency. A 2021 interview named Steve Greenland as chief executive and the originator of its best-known mission idea.
That mission is called ROKS, short for Responsive Operations for Key Services. The idea is to use a 6U CubeSat, a satellite about the size of a shoebox, to send quantum encryption keys to the ground using single particles of light, which could make communications much harder to eavesdrop on. Craft Prospect leads a group of partners, including the University of Strathclyde, while the University of Bristol built the mobile ground station that receives the signal at Goonhilly Downs in Cornwall. The company describes its aim as "SMART SECURE SPACE".
Craft Prospect is based in Glasgow, which the company and several writers describe as a growing European hub for CubeSats and small satellites. A 2020 profile put the team at fifteen people, so it is a very small company, though that figure is dated, and the profile says it saw itself as embedded in the UK space supply chain. A 2020 timeline from Invest Glasgow also records that it won a European Space Agency contract for quantum-technology satellite systems that year.
Its listed values are agility in responding to customer challenges, people, which it describes as a trusted, engineer-led network, and excellence through continuous improvement. In a 2021 interview, quantum technology developer Dr Sonali Mohapatra, who joined in 2019 after research posts in Canada and the UK, said that "the main challenge as a small satellite company is to be daring enough to think that we can do it". She also said it helped to have all three areas, hardware, software and operations, under one roof. These are the company's own people describing it.
In a company this small, roles are broad. People work as electronics and hardware engineers, software and onboard-computing developers, systems engineers who make the pieces fit together, quantum and optical physicists, and operations specialists who run satellites in orbit. Physics, computer science, maths and electronic engineering are the natural subjects. Because the team is small, the website is the best place to check whether it has grown and what it is working on now.
Website: www.craftprospect.com
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