Reach for the sky: How clusters are helping Europe's aerospace industry take off

Polish space technology company KP Labs has just launched its first satellite, one of the many technologies developed as part of the Silesian Aviation Cluster.

This cluster grew out of the region's glider industry and is now home to 120 aerospace companies.

KP Labs sent nanosatellite Intuition-1, and an onboard data processing unit called Leopard into space on Elon Musk's SpaceX's Falcon 9 last year. The Intuition-1 mission is co-financed by the Polish National Research and Development Center.

"Pictures from the sensor go to the Leopard, then Leopard performs different algorithms, different operations and then we downlink this information, we get this information to the ground station," explained Helena Milevych, the Head of Products at KP Labs.

Processing the earth observation data on board closes the gap between detecting a problem and acting on it - whether this is crisis management such as mapping a fire, or flood or crop applications.

"Usually you will see the entire field being green or yellow but sometimes when there is something going wrong with the crops, for example, the disease starts to develop, you will not notice that because the colour you see won't change," said Grzegorz Łada, the Head of Operations at KP Labs.

"The hyperspectral image is more complex. You can actually see ten different shades of green. So it helps you see that something bad is happening before a human would notice," he added.

The soil mapping project is a collaboration with the European Space Agency.

KP Labs has been part of the cluster since it was founded in 2016 with just three people. Now it's many times bigger, and the cluster has brought them an international reach.

"One of the biggest conferences that we went to was the Space Tech Expo in