A software minnow based in Barrow-in-Furness has won a pivotal role in Nasa’s multibillion-dollar mission to build a lunar base and send a man to Mars.

From its unlikely base in the North West of England and with its roots in Barrow’s ailing shipbuilding industry, 3SL has beaten giants such as IBM and Siemens to provide the software that will direct the design of the most ambitious space project yet – America’s Constellation programme.

The privately owned British company’s Cradle system will not venture beyond the Earth’s surface, but it will co-ordinate the design and manufacture of Orion, a new spacecraft that will replace the Space Shuttle and is charged with carrying a crew to the Moon by 2020.

Cradle will also oversee the development of systems ranging from space suits to, eventually, “Mars habitation units”.

“We are minnows in a sea of sharks,” Mark Walker, the founder of 3SL, which has just 40 engineers, said. “This is a hugely significant win for a small company. It is important news, also, for Barrow-in-Furness, an area that desperately needs to have its profile raised as a centre for industry.”

In recent years, Barrow, the construction site for the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines, has felt the brunt of the decline in British shipbuilding. Its shipyard, operated by BAE, employs about 4,000 workers, less than a third of those working there in the 1980s.

Indeed, the idea for the Cradle management system, which is also used in industries ranging from healthcare to telecoms, came when Mr Walker was working on building the Navy’s Trident fleet at the Barrow submarine yard two decades ago.

Unable to find backing, he says, he set out on his own.

“We had expanded our capability in anticipation of this [Nasa] work. Now that we have it, we will need to recruit more engineers,” he said.

The Constellation project, which was given the green light three years ago by President Bush, has been handed responsibility by Congress for maintaining “US preeminence in space” against a rivals such as Russia, China and India.

It aims to make its first manned flight by 2015. Nasa is under orders to retire the Shuttle in 2010.

According to the Nasa Authorisation Act, passed last year, Constellation will also include “a robust precursor programme” to promote commerce in space and will be “a stepping stone to future exploration of Mars and other destinations”.

However, whereas the Apollo project that put a man on the Moon on July 20, 1969 enjoyed an almost unlimited budget, Nasa today operates under fierce cost constraints.

Crucially for Nasa, with a frozen budget of about $20 billion (£9.8 billion) a year, Cradle will identify design requests that threaten to bust the Constellation budget.

Mr Walker said: “Constellation’s scope, size and complexity far outweighs that of the Apollo Moon missions, but has, in real terms, only a fraction of the financial resources.”

This year, Nasa selected Boeing to build the second stage of the rocket that will carry the Orion module, which will be built by Lockheed Martin under a separate contract worth up to $8.5 billion.

3SL has also won work with Lockheed Martin and Boeing and will play a key role in ensuring that technology from different suppliers knits together.

The British group, whose engineers are carrying out work for Nasa from a new office in Huntsville, Texas, is hoping to win further work beyond its current $7 million contract as Constellation moves forward.

Corporate space invaders

— The first advertisement filmed in space was made by Tnuva, an Israeli milk company, on board Mir, the Russian space station, in 1997

— In 2001, Pizza Hut made a delivery to the International Space Station

— Private interest has concentrated on travel – Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com founder, have all invested in spacecraft

— The Russian space agency currently has the space tourism market cornered. Flights costs $30 million (£14.7 million). They are booked out until 2009

— Plans were floated in Russia last year to mine helium3, a potential power source, from the Moon

— In 2001, a draft Nasa memo highlighted five potential areas for the commercialisation of space: technology, research, infrastructure and facilities, media and communications, and space travel and exploration

Source: Times database

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