Oracle Primavera: Reaching for the Stars with Space Forge

One of RPC’s customers – Space Forge – was part of the UK’s first space mission this week. Find out how RPC and Oracle Primavera Cloud Services helped them to get there.

January 9, 2023 will go down in history as the launch date for the UK’s first space mission, with the aim of sending military and civilian satellites into space from British soil for the very first time. Virgin Orbit used a customised Boeing 747, named Cosmic Girl, to carry the LauncherOne rocket from the launch site at Spaceport Cornwall, near Newquay, to an altitude of 35,000ft off the southern coast of Ireland. There, the rocket was released, ignited its engines and began its own hypersonic flight into space, but a failure during the rocket’s second stage engine firing meant that the mission was lost.

The mission may have been unsuccessful this time, but it is a significant landmark in the UK and Europe’s space race and did successfully prove the concept of creating a horizontal launch capability, quite unlike the familiar vertical launch towers we are used to and the team is determined to investigate what happened and come back to try again.

The UK has a strong reputation in manufacturing satellites and in receiving and interpreting data from active satellites, and being able to launch them from home soil will remain a target for the UK space industry. This flight was carrying satellites for the Ministry of Defence, the US National Reconnaissance Office, the Sultanate of Oman, and a number of UK start-ups, including Space Forge, one of RPC’s clients.

Space Forge, based in Wales, is developing reusable satellites and pioneering the process of in-space manufacturing and return from space. In space, it is possible to forge materials that cannot be created on Earth, from superalloys to pharmaceuticals. Space manufacture takes advantage of weightlessness, contamination-free environments, a natural vacuum, extreme temperature range and total control to create factories unlike any on Earth. Innovations in the targeted return-to-Earth process then enable Space Forge to bring their products back and to track, capture and recover them once they return via a revolutionary ‘no shock’ landing that will safely deliver high-value products to wherever their clients want them. 

It’s the dawn of a new industrial revolution, reducing manufacturing energy consumption by 60%, conserving carbon and extending the lifetime of electronics manufactured in space compared with conventional processes by a factor of 20,000. Find out more about their extraordinary work at www.spaceforge.co.uk

RPC is excited to have played a small part in Space Forge’s endeavours through supplying and implementing Oracle Primavera Cloud Service to support their planning and project management and we’re all watching with interest to see what they will do next. It turns out that even the sky is no longer the limit.  

To find out how Oracle Primavera Cloud Services could help your organisation to soar, contact Alex Chewins for an informal discussion or to arrange a demonstration.