We’re now involved in Gateway, the new space station project
That type of impact is something that Dr Sarah Bourke, chief executive of Skytek, is familiar with. The Dublin-based company’s technology is being used to aid in addressing the impact of natural disasters.
“The best example would be the wildfires in LA,” she says. “For the insurance industry, we can use images from before and after and tell the impact of the damage over a vast area. That scale can be analysed by insurance companies.
“We have taken space technology and applied it to Earth. With insurers, they can track their risk across the world.”
The business began its journey into space with a contract with Enterprise Ireland just over 20 years ago, and its technology will celebrate 20 years on the International Space Station (ISS) this year. Skytek’s technology is, in lay terms, the operating system for the ISS. It manages all the procedures and processes on the station.
“The astronauts are the only people that can take care of the labs when something goes wrong,” says Bourke. “When that happens, they are given a procedure.”
Skytek’s technology is also being used with exploration beyond near-Earth, with Nasa and the European Space Agency’s project to return to the moon and go beyond that.
“We’re now involved in the Gateway, the new space station project,” says Bourke. “There’s a whole process involved and we’re getting ready for them developing a laboratory and other types of projects up there.”
The business has expanded to have offices in the US, UK, Poland and Romania, with the US office particularly focused on growth with the private sector.
“There are lots of commercial operators, like SpaceX and Blue Origin,” says Bourke. “We’ve set up Skytek in the US to get our technology in front of those companies. We want to embrace this new space race and get our technology used by those operators.”
