What caught your eye this week? (June decline, Crab’s eye camera, Space manufacturing)

David Manners, components editor

For the first tine in the history of the semiconductor industry June was a down month for sales.

Steve Bush, technology editor

You just have to admire the team at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology for mastering all the fabrication and construction techniques required to make this proof-of-concept 360-degree refractive-index-independent camera, modelled on a crab’s eye, on top of the theoretical and experimental work they must have put in.

Alun Williams, Web editor

That Redwire, the U.S. space infrastructure company, will be creating a drug development and manufacturing platform for use in space. It’s dubbed a Pharmaceutical In-space Laboratory – Bio-crystal Optimization Xperiment (PIL-BOX). Redwire will be partnering with Eli Lilly and Company, a U.S. pharmaceutical company, to conduct testing during initial flight missions for PIL-BOX. Recently, the company highlighted that it sold its first space-optimised product, which was a space-grown optical crystal. This was manufactured on the International Space Station, in Redwire’s own Industrial Crystallization Facility, which launched to the ISS in 2021.

Offsite links

• Lockheed Martin is doubling its venture capital fund from $200 million to $400 million. Lockheed Martin Ventures invests in start-up technology companies. “In 2021 alone, Lockheed Martin Ventures screened more than 1,000 start-up companies that are leading advancements in the areas such as artificial intelligence, autonomy and robotics, cyber security, and quantum computing,” said Chris Moran, vice president and general manager, Lockheed Martin Ventures.
• That Hyundai will partner with Korean research institutes to develop a vehicle for lunar surface exploration (the company has a controlling stake in the robotics design company Boston Dynamics).
• Finally, Isotropic Systems, the UK satellite connectivity company based in Reading, is rebranding itself to be All.Space as it moves into initial production of its “fifth-gen” multi-link terminals. These are due for release at the end of 2022 – shipping to a “significant backlog” of commercial and NATO defence customers, it states.