Airbus Defence and Space

About the company

As the largest space company in Europe and an integral part of the £14.8 billion UK space sector, we design and manufacture advanced satellites to deliver solutions on the ground from climate change monitoring to global communications. Through the European Space Agency we lead international missions from the ExoMars rover which is set to autonomously navigate on the red planet to enabling scientists to get a closer look at our Sun than ever before with the Solar Orbiter.

For over six decades the Airbus Defence and Space site of Stevenage in Hertfordshire has been the lynchpin for the development and construction of Telecommunications, Scientific, Earth Observation and Meteorology Satellites, Planetary Surface Robotics, spacecraft structures, propulsion systems, mechanisms and antennas. The Stevenage site has an Assembly, Integration and Test (AIT) workforce of over 300 highly qualified and skilled employees who operate in some of the best equipped and state-of-the-art development, assembly, test and production facilities in the space industry.

The AIT facilities offer a comprehensive suite of manufacturing and test capabilities from piece part manufacture, construction of light-weight honeycomb panel composites; CFRP filament wound composites, to full structure assembly, including propulsion, harness and thermal subsystems, to the assembly integration and test, of complex satellites in clean rooms of cleanliness class ISO 8. The latest addition is the Bio-Clean Facility where the ExoMars Rover Vehicle was built for the 2020 mission to Mars.

The environmental test facilities include vibration, shock, thermal vacuum, climatic, static and high-powered RF testing in vacuum to support the qualification of components, equipment, mechanisms and antennas. The extensive range of facilities provides customers with a ‘one stop’ test house capable of handling products from individual components and mechanisms (ADTMs / SADMs / Cryogenic Coolers) to spacecraft payloads and complete small satellites, nanosats and cubesats developed by third parties.