Highligts

Last year Stork Product Engineering has acquired the 'Wheels Business' of Astrium. It involves momentum and reaction wheels for the space market.

After a 15-month selection process involving many interested European companies, Stork Product Engineering was chosen as the preferred purchaser. Stork Product Engineering has thus acquired, from Astrium, the rights and hardware necessary to continue the production of Mechanical Wheels for both institutional and commercial markets. Stork Product Engineering already has considerable space expertise and this acquisition strengthens its product base.

Astrium's Mechanical Wheels business began in the 1970s at what were Hawker Siddeley Dynamics, and later British Aerospace Space Systems in Stevenage, England. With development support from the European Space Agency, flight hardware was, over the years, supplied for a wide range of missions, both commercial and scientific and a large number of spacecraft. These included ESA's Olympus communications satellite and the ESA cornerstone science missions SOHO, XMM, INTEGRAL and latterly Rosetta. Non ESA sales included Radarsat 1 for Canada, Skynet 4 for the UK MoD, Apex and SeaSTAR for Orbital Science Corp., USA and GreenSat for Houteq, South Africa. The largest of the wheels produced by Astrium had, with 40NmS at 0.3Nm torque, the highest performance capability available from any European supplier.