15 minutes with: Alison Grey

How would you describe your job to somebody you’d just met?

My job is to solve hard problems for clients as fast as possible, developing and advising on space-based systems including satellite communications (SATCOM) and alternative position, navigation, and timing (PNT) solutions for our customers. I’m based out of our Global Innovation and Technology Centre (GITC), just outside of Cambridge, UK.

Hard problems are usually hard because they are a mix of technology, process, and commercial factors, which means there are multiple unknowns. Our clients often come to us knowing what they want to achieve but not knowing how to achieve it. Working closely with our clients, I will often set the operational and technical scope, and agree what good looks like. Then, I pull the multiskilled team together to deliver on that outcome.

What key challenges are your clients facing, and how are you helping to solve them?

In PNT, for example, the fundamental challenge is that Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) services, including Global Positioning System (GPS), are free services that we rely on globally to support our emergency services, and telecommunications, water, and energy networks, but GNSS services are easily interrupted though radio interference.

This is a civil challenge, a defence challenge, a technical challenge, and an operational challenge. The UK government and UK infrastructure operators know it’s their responsibility to find solutions that protect our critical national infrastructure.

For satellite communications, the challenges and opportunities are created by the radical and rapid transformation that the SATCOM industry is experiencing. Factors including huge private funding, from for example SpaceX (Starlink/Starshield) and Amazon (Amazon LEO), have changed the supply chain for SATCOM and made the market far more competitive.

Competition has created compelling new services that have increased demand for SATCOM from end users, whether they are consumers, civil, or defence. We are supporting our clients, who are both buyers and suppliers, though this transformation, to make certain that they thrive and survive the change.

What makes PA stand out?

PA arguably hosts the UK’s most qualified military satellite communications consultancy team. We bring real, solid clarity to initial ambiguity, and work hard to deliver the results that the client needs.

We help clients see the wood for the trees and set long-term plans to realise massive benefits. We deliver strategic capability, and we hold ourselves to account on behalf of the client. We’re deeply embedded within both the SATCOM and PNT ecosystems to bring entities together to solve hard problems that can’t be solved by one party alone. If it’s a really hard problem, and we can’t solve it, we’ll bring the team together who can to accelerate the work.

How are you delivering innovation and transformation for your clients?

In PNT, we’re working with new systems for position and timing, including developing some ourselves. We’re in a really interesting situation where GNSS services, which have been free and worked really well, are under threat. There’s no direct alternative to GPS, so we need to think differently.

One way to reach a similar quality of service is by using completely different technical solutions. Some of these will be on the ground instead of in space. For moving or flying assets, sensors on board that asset can help it know where it is, just like human senses help us navigate. Combine this with local compute power and sensor fusion using novel compute techniques, and a system can act as an alternative to GNSS positioning. There are fantastic UK businesses innovating in those spaces. Our job is to look at what they’re doing, help them get their product to the performance level that users need, and then take those solutions to market.

How do you use AI and quantum in your work?

In satellite communication systems and PNT, AI isn’t novel anymore – it’s taken as read. In satellite communication, we’ve gone from systems with three GEO satellites to, in LEO, thousands. They all need to be operated at a speed that humans can’t manage. That’s a job for AI. In PNT systems, a flying vehicle might have a mixture of sensors, for example Lidar and an Inertial Measurement Unit. Data from these sensors feeds an AI engine that learns about its environment and enhances the navigation capability in flight.

When people come to GITC and I talk to them about quantum, I explain that humans have mastered the use of some natural resources – for example, we create a huge range of plastics from oil and use plastic in clothing, cars, crisp packets, and more. ‘Quantum’ is the natural resource that sits inside of an atom. Humans have not mastered the properties of an atom – yet.

PA is at the forefront of mastering the attributes of quantum elements. At the GITC, we’re doing some work for the European Space Agency on a quantum radio receiver that looks at the radio frequency broadcasts from satellites in space. GNSS/GPS works by sensing the radio broadcasts from a handful of dedicated GNSS satellites and triangulating these signals to ascertain the location of the receiver. Our quantum radio receiver can also see thousands of satellites that are not dedicated to GNSS, to give an alternative source of positioning.

What are your future goals?

I have a strong interest in supporting our European governments and commercial operators and suppliers to revolutionise the way we design, develop, operate, and use ground systems to connect space systems to ground. Why am I interested in this? Because I believe that through a mixture of standardisation and collaboration, this ground-based backbone will give Europe what it needs to support its societies to thrive.