- By Melissa Landon
- July 06, 2023
- Siemens
- Feature
Summary
In Las Vegas June 11-15, Siemens Realize LIVE 2023 celebrated the company as a leading cloud provider and highlighted a number of its partners who have made the world a better or more interesting place with the help of Siemens software.
What do specially designed prosthetic arms, surfing pools and carbon-neutral space balloons have in common? Siemens software can help create or power them. In Las Vegas June 11-15, Siemens Realize LIVE 2023 celebrated the company as a leading cloud provider and highlighted a number of its partners who have made the world a better or more interesting place with the help of Siemens software.
“It’s not just about making the best product anymore,” said Brenda Discher, head of Communication and VP of Business Strategy and Marketing at Siemens Digital Industries. “Customers now have to deal with the four C’s: climate, covid, conflict and competition. These are all factors driving digitalization for our customers.”
Space Perspective, a Siemens partner dedicated to sharing the experience of space travel with as many people as possible, will be offering ordinary people the chance to travel to space in their specially designed SpaceBalloon. Their mission is to inspire people to care for our planet by showing them what it looks like from space through a six-hour, carbon-neutral space flight. Siemens technology allowed the company to make the spacecraft just the right shape.
Space tours: A unique experience
The Space Perspective journey begins at the Kennedy Space Center, where explorers will have the opportunity to tour the facility and meet the Space Perspective team.
The capsule seats eight people and a pilot. The six-hour flight consists of the launch, ascent, apogee, descent and splashdown into the ocean. During the apogee, explorers will have two full hours to see Earth from afar, marvel at the blackness of space, and identify the line of our atmosphere.
Because the adventurers are taking the trip to enjoy the 360-degree panoramic view of space, designers outfitted the aircraft with the largest windows ever sent to space. The SpaceBalloon was designed for comfort and accessibility, so it includes a bathroom, a bar, and high-speed Wi-Fi connection.
Space Perspective has already sold 1,600 tickets, and most of the tickets were purchased by groups of people taking up all eight seats to experience space together. The tickets cost $125,000—quite a bit cheaper than the $500,000 to several million dollar ticket price that is common for regular people to go to space.
An unmanned test flight will take place later this year.
“Safety was priority number one, two and three when we designed the SpaceBalloon,” said Jane Poynter, founder, co-CEO, and chief experience officer at Space Perspective.
A sustainability-forward model
“Sustainability means different things to different people,” explained Dale Tutt, VP Industry Strategy, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “It’s not just about saving the planet. It’s also more profitable for the company and better for your people.”
Spaceship Neptune, which includes the SpaceBalloon, Reserve Descent System and Neptune Capsule, is the world’s only carbon neutral spaceship. Rockets do not propel the spaceship; rather, the SpaceBalloon, powered by renewable hydrogen, directs it into and through space. Spaceship Neptune’s gentle ascent is part of what makes the trip accessible to anyone medically able to fly on a commercial airplane.
Not only is the SpaceBalloon designed with sustainability in mind but also the trip itself is intended to inspire.
“Going to space is truly transformational. Many astronauts return from space wanting to get involved in environmental activities,” Poynter said.
How Siemens software brings explorers the space perspective
“We had to run thousands of simulations,” Poynter said. “We would not have been able to do this without Siemens software and technology.”
The Space Perspective team utilized Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio and parallel-processing AWS servers to calculate the best shape for the Spaceship Neptune capsule to ensure a safe, comfortable and thrilling trip to space.
Tutt, who first joined Siemens in 2019 as the aerospace lead, helped explain how Siemens technology informed the creation of Spaceship Neptune. The software generated numerous simulations that showed how different shapes for the aircraft would handle takeoff, flight and the subsequent landing in the ocean.
“The bottom of the capsule is pointed, not round,” Tutt said. “It is designed to be aerodynamic and to successfully and gently land in the ocean without tipping over.”
Read more about the Space Perspective experience on the company website.
Other topics presented at the Siemens Realize LIVE 2023 event were more down to earth but no less inspiring.
They included:
- Thinking digital with Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli for the 37th America’s Cup
- Optimizing aircraft communication network design in a digital thread
- Extending the digital twin to wire harness manufacturing engineering
- How to effectively assign users across the organization to workflows.
About The Author
Melissa Landon is the content editor at Automation.com.
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