‘When it comes to making access to Space easier and more affordable, why not resort to an established infrastructure that already exists?’ This is one of the questions Airbus engineers asked themselves when they started looking at how they could make the many benefits of Space-based activities accessible to a wider community.

Turns out: The International Space Station (ISS) – one of (if not the) most reliable assets humanity has in Space today – offers just that. “When we first started thinking about Bartolomeo, we soon saw that while payload space on the ISS was available and well-used especially for agency-backed research, we were not exploiting the station’s full potential,” says Christian Steimle, now Head of the Bartolomeo Programme at Airbus Space. “So we started looking at how we could establish both additional infrastructure and a commercial service, which would enable more flexibility, a faster time-to-orbit, greater affordability and simpler processes.”

The result: The Bartolomeo platform and the related All-in-One Space Mission Service. This external payload hosting facility, named after the younger brother of Christopher Columbus, was built by Airbus in Bremen and installed on the outside of the ISS’ European Columbus Module at the very front of the space station. ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer completed its installation by establishing a final cable connection in March 2022 and the platform is ‘open for business’.

The team has since added the ArgUS Multi-Payload Carrier to the portfolio, a payload accommodation plate built by the Airbus team in Houston and ready to host up to 10 smaller payloads within one standard payload slot.

#NextSpace at Its Best

Without even knowing it at the time, the team developed what we could call one of Airbus Space’s very early #NextSpace topics – which goes to show that what we call #NextSpace is not just a theoretical concept, but reflects real developments in the Space domain. And in a way shows that the much-evoked division between ‘New Space’ and ‘Old Space’ is artificial.

“Bartolomeo is for everyone,” says Steimle. New entrants and established players from around the globe appreciate that on Bartolomeo, flying a LEO mission becomes comparatively easy and affordable, and this is reflected by the customer base: “We are looking at a quite healthy mix of customers,” he says. “Of course, Space Agencies welcome the opportunity of this additional payload space, but we have also signed up commercial customers and research organizations – and some capacity remains.”