SITAEL IS LEADING THE CONSORTIUM SELECTED BY THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION TO DEVELOP VERY HIGH POWER ELECTRIC PROPULSION FOR SPACE EXPLORATION TO THE MOON AND BEYOND
SITAEL will coordinate a pan-European consortium of 8 Companies and Institutions in the upcoming European project “ASPIRE”, which stands for “Advanced Space Propulsion for Innovative Realization of Space Exploration”.
The ASPIRE project has been selected by the European Commission within the Horizon 2020 SPACE-28-TEC-2020 open call. Main goal of the project will be to further advance the development of a very high power electric propulsion system based on Sitael’s HT20k, a 20 kilowatt thruster that is one of the largest and most powerful all around the World. The propulsion system has been conceived to serve large platforms for Exploration and Space Transportation, thus enabling manned missions to the Moon and Mars, as well as On Orbit Operation services.
The participants of ASPIRE are from all over Europe: three are from Italy (Sitael, Microtest Srl and University of Pisa), one from France (Thales Alenia Space), one from Germany (Advanced Space Technology GmbH), one from the United Kingdom (Imperial College of London), one from Spain (Universitat Carlos III de Madrid) and one from Belgium (SME4Space).
ASPIRE will last until June 2023.
The main innovative aspect of the project is a well-balanced mix of technology advancement at hardware level, of test campaigns on the developed propulsion system, and of Artificial Intelligence Predictive modelling tools which will be used to forecast the system behaviour in Space.
Besides ASPIRE, which is confirming Sitael leadership in electric propulsion systems, Sitael is leading an Italian team for a multi-mission all electric platform for ASI (PLATiNO), equipped with the Company smallest thruster -HT100-, and is responsible for the Electric Propulsion Subsystem of the Italian GovSatCom geostationary satellite, with a 5 kW Xenon propulsion system.
