Nine Air Cadets, accompanied by Flying Officer Gary Harding, from 2495 (Totton) Detached Flight visited Astrium’s Portsmouth site on Thursday 6 August.

The visit was organised by Astrium employees Karen Mattingly, who currently holds the rank of Flight Sergeant at the Hythe Squadron, Robin Davies, himself an ex-cadet at Hythe, and Martin Wallace.

During their visit, the cadets – whose ages ranged between 13 and 18 - were shown film clips of how satellites are assembled and of the Astrium space plane concept, an aircraft for future space tourism.

A visit to the clean room left the cadets intrigued by the size of some of the components and the measures that need to be taken to ensure a static, dust and dirt free environment within a clean room.

Flight Sergeant Mattingly, who works as a Production Planner at Portsmouth said: “Satellite communications is one of the subjects that cadets can study for their corps exams and we thought a visit to our facility would be interesting for them. Robin, Martin Wallace and I organised this trip so they could see first hand the manufacture of assemblies, hybrids and payloads that we carry out on the Portsmouth site. They were actually amazed to see technology like this so close to their homes and it has hopefully increased their interest in taking the corps satellite communications exams. Who knows, it might even encourage some of them into the space sector when they leave school.”

Astrium is a world leader in satellite manufacture “Number 1 in Europe and no. 3 worldwide”

Some of Astrium’s missions have included Ariane, the International Space Station, Envisat, Mars Express, Skynet 5. Astrium has business activities covering civil and military telecommunications and Earth observation, science and navigation programmes.