Space for New Ideas, Courage and Ambitious Goals

The door to the converted Hangar 4 opens, revealing a large hall. The gates on the long side of the building can be opened and lead directly onto the tarmac. On the other side is the entrance to a state-of-the-art biolab. Further ahead, a staircase leads to the newly installed first floor, where people are working in meeting rooms, offices and a lounge. Open spaces invite people to mingle and exchange ideas. This is the new home of the UZH Space Hub, located in Innovation Park Zurich on the grounds of the Dübendorf airfield.

Oliver Ullrich, you’re the Director of the UZH Space Hub. What’s it like working here in Hangar 4?

It’s a great feeling – a feeling of newness and being on the verge of breakthroughs. After all, we have a unique opportunity here to work with our partners to turn research and development into reality. We’re not at the finish line yet but are just getting started with a lot of new aerospace projects.

What exactly is the Space Hub?

The Space Hub is the university’s innovation cluster for aviation and space travel. It combines a breadth of space-related fields at the university, focusing on biotechnology, medicine, Earth observation, remote sensing, astrophysics and autonomous flying and navigation. The Space Hub was previously a UZH network structure that built bridges between disciplines.  Thanks to the new location, we have the opportunity to implement our innovations and applications and carry out tests at a physical site. We are building an incubator that links research, technology and business, paving the way for future innovations. We put teams into contact with the private sector and make it clear to them what excellent potential we have here. Start-ups can rent space or lab access from us and implement their ideas here. As an innovation cluster, we provide our expertise, experience and networks.

What advantages are there to being located at the Innovation Park?

We are here in the middle of one of the strongest regions in Europe, academically and economically speaking. This location offers unique advantages because of the direct connection to the airfield.  It’s an innovative environment – a space for new ideas, courage and ambitious goals. Here we can give the knowledge we acquire as a university back to society. We’re part of a knowledge value chain that is emerging in connection with the Switzerland Innovation Park Zurich.

What does this look like in concrete terms?

A good example of this is the zero-gravity production of human tissue. Weightlessness in low Earth orbit is used to grow three-dimensional organ-like tissues – called organoids – from human adult stem cells. On Earth this process is difficult, time-consuming, not very reliable and requires auxiliary devices like supporting structures – all just because of gravity. At UZH we’ve therefore developed a process, together with Airbus, that uses weightlessness and is far superior to tissue production processes on Earth. We successfully tested this process twice on the ISS and were awarded the first prize of the Orbital Reef Innovation Award. Here in Hangar 4 we have Prometheus Life Technologies, a spin-off of the university, which is using our biolabs to take the next step of making these procedures commercially viable. Biotech and medical research is one of the focus areas of UZH, which is among the world's leading research universities in the life sciences.

Can you name any other examples of topics being tackled at the Space Hub right now?

Earth observation is an area that has almost infinite applications. Thanks to new sensor and detection technologies, our environment can be observed from space down to the smallest detail, with unprecedented precision and levels of information. There are a lot of applications in precision agriculture. You can see exactly where which kind of vegetation is growing, where there are pest problems, where irrigation is needed or what the fertilizer requirements are. Earth observation provides a picture of the Earth that allows us to study biodiversity and do climate monitoring. Without it, we’d simply be blind with respect to our planet. UZH is a leader in this field. Flight missions for geo-observation have often been conducted from Dübendorf airfield.

We’ve also been testing fast autonomous drones here for a longer time. UZH is a world leader when it comes to autonomous navigation as well. These drones can be used in search and rescue operations, in areas that are dangerous for humans, and of course in places where humans currently cannot reach, like exploring Mars.

What companies are currently housed in Hangar 4?

In addition to the UZH spin-off Prometheus Life Technologies, Dufour Aerospace and Caeli Nova are also present here. Dufour Aerospace combines the advantages of helicopters and the advantages of fixed-wing aircraft for efficient and sustainable electrically powered transport of materials and people. Caeli Nova develops emergency oxygen systems, which dovetails with the university’s hypoxia research.

What role does the biolab play here at the Space Hub?

The extremely high set-up costs for a biolab are a major hurdle for biotech start-ups. At the Space Hub's biolab, start-ups can conduct applied research and development activities for a limited time. And the same applies to our hangar spaces and workshops, which can be used as needed. We want to remove hurdles and obstacles so that the next generation has an easier time making their ideas and developments a reality.

We are in a particularly important moment for the aerospace industry – why is that?

In the coming decades, near-Earth space will be used much more intensively than before.  By this I mean the New Space Economy – the utilization of low Earth orbit for value creation on Earth. Modular, scalable and robust private space stations will populate low Earth orbit after the anticipated end of the government-run International Space Station (ISS) at the beginning of the next decade. Transport and usage costs will decrease massively. Space travel has been so expensive so far mainly because we’ve been using highly complex, non-reusable systems that were designed only for research and development, not for mass production. In the next phase, we will deploy robust and reusable transport systems. No one would throw away an airplane after a flight, after all. And we already have enormous knowledge today about using microgravity to produce things that are not possible on Earth or are only possible with great effort. This includes producing human tissues and organs, semiconductors, optical fibers, certain drug production steps – and this is just the beginning. But we can’t yet put any of this into practice because transport is too expensive.

This all sounds quite futuristic.

It’s very real. It’s somewhat akin to 100 years ago, when Ad Astra, the first airline, was established right here in Dübendorf, connecting Dübendorf with Nuremberg and Geneva. Not long before that, no one thought airlines were possible, and the first airplanes were considered a curiosity.

Will the Zurich metropolitan area and Switzerland as a whole be able to compete in the new global space race?

It’s more of a race for value than a race for space. We need to use the value chains. Switzerland has been number one on the global innovation index for around ten years now. The Zurich region boasts the strongest economy and the highest levels of innovation in all of Switzerland.
We have a liberal business-friendly culture with excellent infrastructure and an outstanding university system. The Government Council of the Canton of Zurich defined space travel as a flagship project in April. It’s hard to imagine a better set of conditions. Switzerland doesn't need to build its own rockets and spaceships but can instead take advantage of the opportunities offered by this new market. Now, in order to get ready for this, we need infrastructure, end-to-end value chains, strong innovation and research, as well as excellent teaching and training, both for young talents and for professionals. This is where the universities come in. It’s not just something that we want to do, it’s also our duty.

Isn’t promoting the New Space Economy a contradiction of our efforts to reduce climate emissions?

We only know about climate change at all thanks to satellite systems and Earth observation from space. The New Space Economy is on the path to becoming sustainable. All players are clearly pursuing this goal. SpaceX has developed reusable rockets and spacecraft with the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Starship. Soon there will be a Space Traffic Control. Space travel will enable many new technologies that will help us achieve more sustainability here on Earth. Any emissions that impact the climate occur exclusively during launch from Earth, with the Falcon 9 producing about as much as three long-distance airplane flights.

Sometimes you hear the keyword “green aviation” – what’s that all about?

It's about avoiding pollutants, avoiding noise and saving fuel. Skylab, which has close ties to UZH, is a foundation that is conducting research in this area as part of the EU-SESAR program. Currently, for example, work is being done together with institutional and private sector partners to develop an instrumental pilot support system for noise- and fuel-optimized landing approaches.

Lots of different disciplines are working together here at the Space Hub. What are the benefits of this interdisciplinary cooperation?

Almost too many to name. I’m not only talking about the purely technical and application-oriented fields, but philosophy, theology and film studies are also involved in the Space Hub. But it's not just about the subject matter discussions: Of course, it's good if a team monitoring biodiversity also knows a thing or two about plants, energy and biotechnology. And if you’re building devices, it makes sense to know about sensor technology. But having an open dialogue about methodology or scientific theory is just as important. How does this other discipline think? How does it solve problems? It expands your horizons enormously to apply the methodological approaches and principles of another field in your own, even if it’s just to learn that you should be a bit humbler and more careful when it comes to your findings. Working across disciplines stimulates curiosity, which is the foundation for good research, and it leads us to ask questions that we otherwise wouldn’t have had we strictly stayed in our own field.