A Harwell-based company, founded in 2013, that makes folding antennas and booms which unfold in space once a satellite is in orbit.
Oxford Space Systems makes things that fold up small for launch and open out once they reach space. Its main products are deployable antennas for satellites: a wrapped rib antenna used for radar imaging and communications, a helical antenna, and an offset reflector antenna. It also makes compact designs for CubeSats, which are very small satellites, and has developed deployable panels and flexible composite boom systems. A deployable structure matters because a rocket has very little space inside, yet an antenna often needs to be wide to work well. The company's own site says it develops and manufactures deployable antennas and structures for spacecraft.
We could not find a founder-written mission statement, and its site gives no values page that we could read. What the pages show is a clear engineering purpose: lighter, smaller and simpler structures than those already flying. A 2017 trade article described the founder and chief executive then as Mike Lawton, and said the company had 17 employees and was working on a novel reflector surface with Reliance Precision, with support from the European Space Agency, as part of a European wish to rely less on a single US supplier for large deployable antennas.
The company is based at Harwell Space Cluster in Oxfordshire, in the Zephyr Building. A second facility in Abingdon was commissioned in 2023. By then the company said it had more than 100 staff, a big growth from 17 in 2017, with expertise in radio frequency design, structures, mechanisms, thermal engineering and materials. It reports that 23 flight units have launched, that 25 were delivered in 2024, and that it holds the quality certification ISO 9001:2015. These are figures from its own site and the dates on them are not all clear.
Its antennas turn up inside other people's missions. Lacuna Space, for example, uses an Oxford Space Systems deployable helical antenna on its satellites, and a 2024 trade report says it delivered high-power antennas to Astro Digital. That shows the culture of a supplier: engineers who have to meet other companies' deadlines, and who see their parts fly on a range of different satellites. The sources do not say more about working life there.
Teams in a business like this include mechanical engineers who design the folding structures, materials specialists, radio frequency engineers, test technicians who run vibration and thermal tests, and quality, procurement and production staff for the factory floor. Physics, engineering and design and technology are natural starting subjects, and practical, hands-on skills are valued in a manufacturing company that builds hardware to flight standard.
Website: oxfordspacesystems.com
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