OSS is developing two variants of its AstroTube boom technology. The first AstroTube boom was successfully flown and demonstrated on orbit late 2016 on the AlSat-Nano mission (top image). This represented two records for the UK space industry: going from material concept to flight in under 30 months; and the World’s longest retractable microsat boom system. The AstroTube Max (bottom image) sees an AstroTube boom surrounded by a nested stack of carbon-fibre tubes, thus providing a significant increase in structural stiffness and payload mass deployment ability. The boom can be scaled and tuned to cope with a large range of mission needs. Two 4.5 metre A-Max booms are due on orbit in late 2019 to serve as antenna deployment systems.
