We have had a very busy start to the year which is why ours news updates have been so few in the past 3 months. We are still very busy with test work (thermal vacuum bakeouts and thermal vacuum cycling) as well as building a large piece of bespoke test equipment for a new customer.

TVAC#1 has been down for maintenance longer than scheduled, primarily due to the sudden influx of test work at the beginning of the year which demanded our attention. We are now just about to begin pumping down and leak testing TVAC#1 and checking the new T/C's and heaters we have fitted. We will also be fitting a PID control unit for the IR heaters to this vacuum chamber so that it has the same capability as TVAC#2.

We have also had delays in obtaining materials required for commissioning our FTIR system for contamination monitoring during bakeouts. We now have everything in stock and will be working to get this established as soon as possible. Our first use of this will be to run blank bakes on our TVAC#1 vacuum test chamber to get it back in service. We will then be able to offer in-house FTIR analysis for contamination control for both our thermal vacuum bakeout facilities.

Finally, we have not reviewed our Outgassing (ECSS-Q-ST-70-02) facility charges for over 4 years and as such a price for this service is planned for later in the year. We will be announcing any changes via our news blog and our newsletter.

We are back and already started on 2019! We have test work running throughout January, a solar simulator in the final stages before shipping, modifications to complete for the TVAC#1 thermal vacuum test chamber and an additional premises to move some of our UV and lamp testing facilities into. It's already looking rather busy.

As always, news updates and announcements will be made on our news blog and via our twitter account, but for now we just wanted to wish all of our customers a Happy New Year and say we look forward to working with you in 2019!

We would like to thank all of our customers, old and new, for continuing to select our products and services in 2018 and we look forward to working with you in the future. From all of us at TS-Space Systems, we'd like to wish you a very Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year for 2019!

Last day opening 2018: Friday December 21st
First day opening 2019: Wednesday January 2nd

We are pleased to announce that our second thermal vacuum test chamber, TVAC#2, is now fully tested and online. In the first week already we have managed to accommodate a last-minute test requirement for a customer and we are now pre-baking the chamber in preparation for a series of flight hardware bakeouts.

The chamber features:

• PID controlled thermal plate with resistive heating and liquid channels for cooling either by chiller circulator or LN2
• Cold trap with removable fascia for lab analysis if required
• QCM for bakeout monitoring 
• Residual Gas Analyser (Hiden Analytical)
• Standard 16 T-type thermocouple channels (more channels, or different TC types can be added with notice)
• Temperature, pressure, QCM and RGA all logged digitally
• Door seal and chamber wall fluid cooling lines for high temperature tests (>300°C)
• Scroll pump and magnetically levitated turbo molecular pump meaning a completely oil-free pumping system

We also have a multi-part shroud under manufacture which will use the same resistive heating and fluid line design as the thermal plate. This is scheduled to be installed towards the end of the year when we tend to have more downtime for our test house facilities.

As you are no doubt aware by the multitude of emails you will have received from every website you've ever visited, the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect on the 25/05/18. It is essentially an attempt to bring a unified set of regulations to the privacy of data collected by websites and transparency to how/why websites collect their users' data. We would like to draw your attention to the changes we have made to our website and associated policies in order to comply with these regulations.

Firstly, we would like to make clear that the only information we collect is via our Contact page and Test Quote Request form and this information is only ever used to keep a record of your enquiry, facilitate our response and, if you opted in, send the occasional newsletter. We have never and will never sell or pass on our user's data to third party companies. Please see our Privacy Policy for more information.

As stated in our Cookie Policy our side does use Google analytics cookies for monitoring site usage.

In order to comply with the upcoming GDPR regulations we have carried out the following:

• We have updated our Terms and Conditions
• We have updated our Privacy Policy
• We have updated our Cookie Policy 
•  All user data submitted to date via our Contact Page and Test Quote Request form have been deleted. Any new submissions via these forms must agree to the stated Terms and Conditions and actively opt-in to our newsletter. Please note that our newsletter was always an opt-in for our users, but we have concluded this is the easiest and safest way to ensure your privacy preferences are met and to avoid any contravention of the GDPR regulations.

If you have any questions or concerns about what this means with regard to your data or privacy when using our website, please feel free to contact us.