Mars, suburb of Turin – la Repubblica

This article is taken from the Italian Tech special on newsstands on May 4 with Repubblica, dedicated to research and excellence centers in Italy
All images are by Matteo Capone/Contrasto.

Turin has long been the Italian capital of aeronautics: a century ago planes, helicopters and flying machines took off from the Collegno airfield, just outside the municipal perimeter. Here, at the end of November, the construction sites for the City of Aerospace will open, a project that aims to coordinate and bring together the efforts of 300 large and small companies, the Turin Polytechnic and the many startups that are springing up in the sector. A museum, classrooms for at least 700 students and a completely new park are planned.

Where Corso Marche ends today there is an abandoned yellow building, between warehouses and buildings of unusual proportions. And there is the headquarters of Altec, the Italian center of excellence for the supply of engineering and logistics services in support of the International Space Station and the development and implementation of planetary exploration missions.

“About eighty people work here, about ten are in Cologne, with activities at ESA and DLR, and we have a liaison office at NASA,” says Vincenzo Giorgio. Neapolitan, 65 years old, with a degree in electronic engineering from Federico II, he is managing director of the Aerospace Logistics Technology Engineering Company. “We take care of the preventive maintenance of the International Space Station: we check the correct functioning of the modules under our responsibility. Knowing the average life times of all the equipment, and knowing how much material they have available on the space station, we make sure we have what it serves in our warehouses in Turin and we manage the transport into orbit,” he explains.

A scaled-down reproduction of the International Space Station hangs from the ceiling of Altec’s entrance: in reality it measures 73 by 109 meters, the size of a football field, and weighs 450 tons. To get an idea of ​​how big it is, you need to look for the figurine of an astronaut, near the module they call the Dome, because on a semicircular vault it has windows that allow you to look outside, where 16 sunrises and the same number of sunsets follow one another in 24 hours. The Dome is one of the components made in Italy, one of the few countries in the world capable of building space modules, and over 40 percent of the habitable volume on the International Space Station is Italian. “Our commitment in terms of investment in people, money and resources is constant and long-standing, and today we are able to offer NASA an end-to-end service that includes module construction, maintenance and personnel training”, explains Giorgio. This explains the significant presence of Altec in American space missions, but also the fact that Italy is among the first signatories in Europe of the Artemis Accords, bilateral pacts with the USA which establish some fundamental principles for the next space explorations

“The ISS will be decommissioned around 2030, it has already gone much further than expected. We are working so that we can carry out those logistics, astronaut training and actual operations activities on the orbital station around the Moon. But also on the surface, as foreseen by Artemis: on behalf of the Italian Space Agency we will build a lunar operations center in Turin”. Where a center capable of simulating Mars already exists, in a 20 by 15 meter shed, with 150 tons of Vesuvius pozzolana, 28 special lamps and a crane. The surface is irregular, and adjustable ramps allow you to simulate ascents and descents with various slopes; then there is a space for testing excavation operations to collect soil samples for analysis. From the control center, a large window and cameras allow you to visually monitor the movements of the Rosalind Franklin rover: not the real one, but one of the twins found in Altec. The mission to Mars, planned for 2022, involved the use of a Proton launch vehicle and the Kazachok landing platform; after the invasion of Ukraine the collaboration between the European and Russian space agencies was suspended and work is now being done to find alternative solutions. ExoMars is expected to restart in 2028; meanwhile, the ROCC (Rover Operations Control Center) and the SOC (Scientific Operations Center) are ready and will serve as a starting point for building a piece of the Moon in Turin. The problems are different: “Compared to Mars, gravity is much lower and the light changes because there is no atmosphere. Furthermore, the soil is an extremely thin regolith, so getting a vehicle to move on the lunar surface is much more difficult. But I think that within a couple of years the control center for the Moon could be finished,” reveals Giorgio.

Mars, the Moon, and then what? “We have a processing center for data from the Gaia satellite that measures the relative positions of galaxies and stars, we operate a coronagraph on another satellite that studies the sun. In June the Euclid satellite will be launched to study dark matter and energy, i.e. the large part of the universe that we do not know. The amount of data that will arrive will be several orders of magnitude greater than what we have dealt with so far, and we will also resort to artificial intelligence for processing”. Altec is responsible for receiving the data, transforming it in a way that is usable by the scientific community, and storing it in secure conditions. For this reason he collaborates with the engineering faculties, the polytechnics, the physics institutes of various Italian universities, but also with the astronomical observatory of Turin, the National Institute of Astrophysics and other research centers, in Italy and abroad .

In addition, in the Cologne office, Altec trains those who go into space, so that they are ready for ordinary maintenance interventions or emergency maneuvers in the event of unforeseen events. They are not only astronauts, but also space tourists, who usually don’t stay in orbit more than 15 days. “Four American projects for private low-orbit stations have been announced – explains Giorgio – and even if I don’t think all of them will be realised, it is certain that a market exists. Two space tourists from Saudi Arabia, whom we have trained, will be leaving soon”.

Founded in April 2003, the Turin company is owned by Thales Alenia Space (63.75%) and the Italian Space Agency (36.25%). “But we are like any other private company in the market; we participate in competitions and sometimes we win, sometimes we don’t. The difference lies in the fact that our facilities are available to the Italian scientific and technological community”, adds Giorgio.

The business model of space has changed a lot in the last ten years, with private companies taking the place of national or supranational structures: with their launchers, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos actually operate in a public sphere, as does Thales Alenia Space. But the most important contribution of private individuals in the aerospace sector is what we could define as creative: inventing new business models. “It is an important stimulus for all of Europe, which traditionally has a very institutional approach”, underlines the CEO of Altec.

In Turin, the aerospace sector now has over 20,000 employees, but the Space Economy is growing stratospherically, also thanks to the 7.2 billion that Italy has allocated up to 2026. Companies directly and indirectly involved benefit from this, and others that seem very far away , for example pharmaceutical companies, advanced industry, auto giants. In space it is possible to study diseases such as osteoporosis in depth, measure the effects of muscle decay, blood pressure or heart rate alterations to find cures for increasingly frequent pathologies. Some technologies developed for a hostile environment can be used for ordinary production. “Let’s think of longer missions, those to Mars for example, for which it takes at least three years for a round trip: let’s say an astronaut has a toothache, and that the only solution is extraction. It will be difficult to find the right tool on the spacecraft, but it will be possible to build it on site by sending a file to a 3D printer. Well, something like this can also be done on Earth, in areas that are difficult to access”, observes Giorgio. Or consider water: today 95 percent of it is recycled on the ISS, but the technology to do so is very expensive; one day, when it will be easier to implement it, it will be able to solve or at least reduce the problem of drought in many areas of the world.

This means having a long-term vision, and Giorgio has it: “Last year, with the Dart mission, a NASA missile hit an asteroid; the effects of the impact will be studied in detail by Hera, another probe, this time from Europe. If one day an asteroid really were to endanger Earth’s life, a solution could come from that mission. Whoever worked on that project did so with the awareness of being committed to the good of humanity: it is an example of how space research is a continuous and constant process: I have to complete what I am doing, but if I don’t get to a result, someone will arrive after me, thanks to my work and that of many others”.

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In the corridors of Altec the atmosphere is relaxed, there are many young people, but there are also those who have been working there for thirty years and know everything about space missions that are almost forgotten today. But isn’t there the risk that chronic political instability could affect the activity of such a strategic company for Italy? “The sensitivity of Italian institutions is very high, regardless of governments. Indeed, the Italian contracts for space activities envisaged by the Pnrr have already been signed. But afterwards we will have to be able to go ahead alone, continue to have a vision and find a way to achieve it, because in our sector if you are not always at the forefront you risk finding yourself ten steps behind”, replies the CEO.

So the next challenge isn’t tomorrow, but already today: “I can’t help but imagine that one day we will be able to inhabit other worlds, such as Mars. Of course, first we need to create a magnetic field, an atmosphere that protects us from radiation and controls the temperature, we need to induce a greenhouse effect to make water return to liquid form. It’s a process we call terraforming, and it’s a very complex one. Or we could find planets in other solar systems that have characteristics similar to Earth, and then the problem would be to get there. We are carrying out studies in the field of hibernation, the University of Bologna is a center of pure excellence from a scientific point of view. We are also working on the exploitation of gravitational waves: by modifying the space-time context we could get from point A to point B no longer with the limits dictated by Einstein, but in much shorter times. Will it happen in ten, a hundred or two hundred years? I don’t know, I know we have to get ready.”

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