The Life Scientific: Professor Martin Sweeting

Discovery

BBC

Science

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Martin Sweeting was a student, he thought it would be fun to try to build a satellite using electronic components found in some of the earliest personal computers. An amateur radio ham and space enthusiast, he wanted to create a communications satellite that could be used to talk to people on the other side of the world. It was a team effort, he insists, with friends and family pitching in and a lot of the work being done on his kitchen table. Somehow he managed to persuade NASA to let his microsatellite hitch a ride into space and, after the first message was received, spent more than a decade trying to get a good picture of planet earth. The technology that Martin pioneered underpins modern life with thousands of reprogrammable microsatellites now in orbit around the earth and thousands more due to launch in the next few years to bring internet connections to remote parts of the world. The university spin-off company, Surrey Satellite Technologies Limited (SSTL) that Martin set up in the 1980s with an initial investment of £100 sold for £50 million, a quarter of a century later. If his company had been bought by venture capitalists, he says he would probably have ended up making TVs. Instead he developed the satellite technology on which so much of modern life depends.

Produce: Anna Buckley

Photo Credit: SSTL

Transcript

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0:40.6	Have a listen on BBC Sounds.
0:42.6	Welcome to Discovery from the BBC.
0:44.7	I'm Jim Muckily and today I'm in conversation with one of the world's leading scientists
0:49.6	and inventors.
0:51.0	It's a story of a sci-fi dream come true.
0:54.4	As a boy, Martin Sweeting dreamed about getting into space.
0:58.8	As a young researcher, he designed his own satellite and built it from scratch, from
1:03.3	electronic components found in the then new personal computers.
1:08.0	Then against all the odds, he persuaded NASA to let his DIY, but thoroughly modern satellite
1:14.8	hitch a ride on one of their Delta rockets.
1:18.3	In the mid-80s, he set up Surrey Satellite Technologies, a spin-off company largely owned
1:23.0	by the University of Surrey, where he worked, to design and build his micro-satellites.
	...

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