OSIP Highlights July-December 2025

ESA set up the Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP) to discover and invest in new unconventional ideas that could greatly benefit and advance European space industry and academia.

Here, the minds behind six projects funded during this period tell us about their research, motivations and goals, as well as how ESA Discovery funding is helping them take their activities to the next level.

Sound waves to support life in space

Keeping astronauts alive on long-duration missions requires reliable systems for producing oxygen and recycling carbon dioxide. Conventional photobioreactors – sealed systems used to grow photosynthetic microorganisms such as cyanobacteria – face a fundamental limitation: light cannot penetrate far into a dense culture, leaving much of the biomass unable to photosynthesise.

Through the 'Acoustic Levitation for Life Support Systems (ALLISS)' activity, ESA Discovery has supported researchers at ESPCI Paris in developing a photobioreactor that uses ultrasound to organise cyanobacteria into thin, evenly spaced layers within a fluid-filled chamber. The layers create clear gaps that act as optical windows, allowing light to penetrate much deeper into the culture and avoiding the "compensation point" – the depth at which light intensity falls too low for photosynthesis to occur.

"What we are trying to do is to improve the efficiency of photobioreactors by overcoming a long-standing limitation: the compensation point," explain Jean-Luc Aider and Maxime Ardré, who lead the research at ESPCI Paris. "The technique used by our teams is acoustic levitation, which allows a spatial organisation of the cyanobacteria into layers, leading to an increased penetration of light into the culture medium. Moreover, acoustic levitation can also be used to handle and collect the cyanobacteria without contact, which is a difficult task in microgravity."

Experiments during a parabolic flight showed that stable trapping in microgravity requires only 0.42 milliwatts – less than a third of the power needed under normal gravity – and that this power requirement changes very little even when the reactor volume is scaled up twentyfold. The results have been published in the journal npj Microgravity, and the team plans to continue developing the technology for both space applications and terrestrial bioproduction.

"The ALLISS activity is relevant to developments in Environmental Control and Life Support Systems, where more robust, low-maintenance, and contamination-free fluid handling and separation technologies are needed for long-duration exploration missions," says Sébastien Vincent-Bonnieu, ESA's lead for the project. "Acoustic levitation provides a novel, contact-free approach that aligns well with ESA's objectives to improve system reliability and resource efficiency in closed-loop life support architectures."

Composites that heal themselves

Carbon fibre reinforced polymer composites offer exceptional strength-to-weight ratios that help keep spacecraft light and mission costs down, but they have a significant weakness: damage is difficult to detect and almost impossible to repair. Swiss company CompPair Technologies has developed a material that changes this picture.

With support from ESA Discovery through the 'Enabling Healable Composite Manufacturing with Towpreg for Space Applications' activity, CompPair has developed HealTech™ CS03, a composite material that repairs damage in minutes when moderate heat is applied. The technology is particularly relevant for propellant tanks, which are subjected to repeated pressure and thermal cycling that causes microcracks to develop. HealTech™ CS03 combines superior resistance to microcracking with the ability to repair any cracks that do form, extending component lifetimes and supporting reusability.

"This technology can pave the way for in-orbit maintenance, unlocking space structure reusability and in-orbit refuelling stations," says Cecilia Scazzoli of CompPair Technologies. "The support provided by ESA through the OSIP programme was pivotal in enabling the transition from an early-stage concept to a product aligned with concrete space market needs – the guidance of the ESA Technical Officer was instrumental in pushing the technology to a higher level of maturity and quality."

The commercial potential is already being recognised. The developments have attracted significant interest from propellant tank manufacturers and end users in the reusable launcher sector, and HealTech™ CS03 is now a commercial product.

"Self-healing composites have been in the pipeline for more than a decade, and the material developed by CompPair brings that concept to life with the specificity of being compatible for space applications," says Ugo Lafont, ESA's lead for the project. "The development of HealTech™ CS03 is enabling an increase of functional lifetime and reparability, paving the way towards reusability and a more sustainable approach for the production and use of composite parts for space applications and beyond."

Making commercial processors space-ready

Modern space missions demand computing power far beyond what traditional space-qualified processors can deliver. Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) System-on-Chip processors – offering high performance at low cost – could fill this gap, but they were never designed to operate in the harsh radiation environment of space. A research team at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, working in collaboration with ESA, has developed a comprehensive methodology for evaluating and hardening these processors for space use.

Through the 'Mixed Software/Hardware-based Fault-tolerance Techniques for Complex COTS System-on-Chip in Radiation Environments' activity, ESA Discovery co-funded a PhD programme that delivered a complete, end-to-end body of work: an open-source benchmark suite for on-board processing (OBPMark), now adopted by ESA; a full radiation characterisation campaign of automotive-grade embedded GPUs covering proton, heavy ion, and total ionising dose testing; novel software mitigations including a CUDA middleware that detects and recovers from radiation-induced faults without requiring any modification to the user application; and a radiation-tolerant reference carrier board validated in real radiation tests.

"What my work contributes is a complete, end-to-end methodology for evaluating and hardening complex COTS System-on-Chips – in particular multicore systems with embedded GPUs – for space use," explains Ivan Rodriguez Ferrandez, who led the research at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and has since co-founded Coros Space, a start-up building on the results of the activity. "For space agencies and emerging space companies, my radiation characterisation and open benchmarks drastically lower the cost and risk of adopting these high-performance devices."

The work has already attracted significant recognition, including the HiPEAC Technology Transfer Award 2021, and OBPMark is now in active use across ESA and beyond. Coros Space, co-founded with a former ESA Young Graduate Trainee, has been admitted to the ESA Business Incubation Centre Nord-France and was recognised as the 2,000th company admitted to the ESA BIC programme.

"The automotive-to-space technology transfer for complex systems is a viable path," says Rodriguez Ferrandez, "which is essential to enable the on-board AI, autonomy, and flexible payloads that future missions will depend on."

Propulsion from thin air

Satellites operating in Very Low Earth Orbit – at altitudes of roughly 200 to 450 kilometres – face a fundamental challenge: the residual atmosphere creates drag that gradually slows the satellite, requiring it to carry propellant to maintain its orbit. Italian company Celeste, in collaboration with the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, has demonstrated a radically different approach: a thruster that uses the residual atmosphere itself as propellant.

Through the 'MISTRAL: Miniaturised Innovative Space Thruster for Operation with Rarefied Air in Low Orbit' activity, ESA Discovery has supported the development and experimental validation of the VOLTA air-breathing electric propulsion system for small satellite platforms. In a landmark demonstration, the team showed that the system can generate positive net thrust – meaning it produces more thrust than the drag created by the collector – using a miniaturised design suited to the CubeSat-scale satellites that are increasingly central to Earth observation and telecommunications.

"Our work demonstrates, for the first time experimentally, that an air-breathing electric propulsion system can generate positive net thrust by harvesting residual atmosphere in Very Low Earth Orbit," says Vittorio Giannetti of Celeste. "This represents a key step toward long-duration missions in these previously inaccessible orbits, with the potential to significantly enhance Earth observation and telecommunications performance in a debris-free environment. At Celeste, we are already partnering with prospective customers to integrate the VOLTA thruster as an enabling technology."

"CELESTE and Sant'Anna School demonstrated, in a world first, the feasibility of a full end-to-end system using air-breathing electric propulsion for sustaining operations in VLEO small platforms," says Eduard Bosch Borràs, ESA's lead for the project. "This feat provides confidence to embark on an ambitious roadmap for the development, maturation, and qualification of the technology, necessary for the utilisation of VLEO commercial applications."

Closing the loop on space waste

Four astronauts on a year-long mission generate around 2,500 kg of waste – packaging, worn clothing, and damaged equipment that currently has nowhere to go. Reducing that burden requires rethinking how materials are managed in space entirely. Through the 'Recycling, Sustainability and Circular Solutions for Future Exploration' activity, ESA Discovery has supported Nextek Limited, a UK company with deep expertise in advanced plastics sorting and decontamination, in exploring how terrestrial recycling technologies could be adapted for low- and zero-gravity environments.

The activity investigated the use of supercritical CO₂ – carbon dioxide held at conditions where it behaves as both a liquid and a gas – as a powerful, waterless cleaning and decontamination process for textiles and polymers. Cleaned plastics can then be melted down and extruded into filament for 3D printing, enabling damaged or worn components to be remade on site rather than discarded.

"The funding from OSIP allowed Nextek to investigate how technologies developed and commercialised in terrestrial applications could be used in low- and no-gravity locations," says Ed Kosior of Nextek. "Without the funding from OSIP, our expertise would not have been applied to space conditions. The funding enabled unique and practical solutions to be developed to make life in space and on the Moon more sustainable."

The commercial implications extend beyond space. "The investigations we commenced and completed in the OSIP programme would result in novel materials handling and waste reduction strategies, as well as cleaning and decontamination equipment that could be used in low-gravity applications," notes Kosior. "As space travel expands in duration and frequency, these solutions will become increasingly important."

"This activity is highly relevant to ESA's future exploration ambitions, particularly for sustained lunar and Mars missions where closed-loop systems are essential," says Adam Mitchell, ESA's lead for the project. "By integrating sterilisation, material recovery, and re-manufacturing, it aims to demonstrate a scalable pathway towards circular resource use in space, ultimately enabling reduced waste, improved crew safety, and the capability to generate functional materials and components on demand."

Tracking the faint and the fast

Space is getting crowded, and the challenge of tracking satellites and debris in Earth orbit – particularly the smallest and faintest objects – is increasingly pressing. Traditional optical survey methods struggle with objects that are too faint to stand out clearly against the background in a single image exposure. Polish technology company ITTI, in collaboration with Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU), has been developing a smarter approach.

Through the 'Synthetic Tracking in SST and NEO Searches' activity, where SST stands for Space Surveillance and Tracking, and NEO for Near-Earth Objects, ESA Discovery has supported ITTI and AMU in developing algorithms that detect fast-moving artificial objects by stacking multiple short exposures. When a satellite or piece of debris crosses a camera's field of view, it leaves a faint streak; by combining signals from several images taken along the object's likely path, the method can reveal objects invisible in any single frame. This is possible because the object's reflected light accumulates coherently across images while random noise averages out, progressively improving the signal-to-noise ratio and making even very faint objects detectable.

"Before the introduction of Synthetic Tracking into SST and NEO searches, there was no practical method capable of reliably detecting elongated streaks of artificial satellites and debris when their signal in a single frame was at or close to the background noise level," explains Joanna Baksalary, Head of the Space Area at ITTI. "Our initial estimates indicate that even objects with a signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio below one in a single exposure can be successfully detected using several images."

Technology gives smaller-aperture telescopes the opportunity to 'reach' much fainter objects that were previously accessible only to the largest observatories. This means that more observations can be performed, as a larger number of observatories, including those equipped with amateur-sized telescopes, will be able to detect faint objects orbiting Earth.

"Enhancing our observational capabilities of space objects and asteroids remains a cornerstone of ESA's technology development efforts," says Tim Flohrer, Head of ESA's Space Debris Office and ESA's lead for the project. "ESA's Technology Vision 2040 identifies 'Sustainability & Circular Space' and 'Space Environment Protection' as two pivotal focus areas. The progress achieved in this activity has yielded encouraging results, which can now be developed further into fully operational components compatible with a variety of instrumentation designs."

 

Discover more about ESA's Open Space Innovation Platform, including how you can submit your own ideas, via our dedicated webpage.