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Astronaut Peake to announce satellite-making plant at Thales' Belfast factory

Astronaut Tim Peake will be in Belfast today
Astronaut Tim Peake will be in Belfast today Astronaut Tim Peake will be in Belfast today

ASTRONAUT Tim Peake will touch down in Belfast today to confirm that the Thales plant in the east of the city is to build the next generation of electric engines for satellites.

Major Peake, who spent the first six months of this year aboard the International Space Station, will officially open a new manufacturing facility where the company - formerly known as Shorts Missile Systems - will recruit 150 engineers, with plans to take staffing levels up to 350 within two years.

French-owned Thales is understood to have chosen Belfast ahead of a number of its other European venues for the investment, which is though to be worth "tens of millions of pounds".

The Belfast plant will build a series of advanced electric engines to power satellites capable of going into high orbit.

Victor Chavez, chief executive of Thales UK, said: “Britain is an attractive pace for us to invest in our space business - there is a lot of encouragement from the government to invest in the industry.”

The company is leveraging skills of staff at its Belfast plant which makes missiles for the international aerospace and defence business, retraining weapons engineers to produce the engines.

According to the company, the manufacturing is highly technical, working to an accuracy measured in tolerances of microns - about 90 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

The engines use electric power collected from satellites’ solar panels to accelerate fuel supplies of xenon gas to speeds of up to 100 times the speed of sound.

Because the gas is moving much faster than conventional chemical rocket engines, they use less about a fifth of the amount fuel to achieve the same effect, making them more efficient.

Mr Chavez said the engines have huge potential to transform powering satellites because of the efficiency they offer.

“These are not experimental designs - they are already in use - and are likely to bring radical change to satellites as they enter wider use,” he said.

“Using less fuel means satellites can have much longer service lives: about half of the mass of most geostationary satellites is fuel so the advantages are clear.”

Thales is involved in a range of activities from aerospace, space and defence to security and transportation, and in the last two years its Belfast plant has secured multi million pound contracts to build radar, communications equipment, launchers and missiles, including the StarStreak missile, for the Malaysian and Thai armies.