The Chamber

This post is about my work, as the allotment barely had a look-in last week. I’ve mentioned before that I work for RALSpace, it’s a great place to work and over the last few years I've been supporting a very exciting new project, for the provision of a 'one-stop testing facility' for the space industry.

Literally heavy traffic on the A34

During the lockdown our site has been closed but some work had to continue, including the delivery of our huge Large Scale Test Chamber which was manufactured in Italy and shipped just as Covid-19 was beginning to affect our lives.

The A34

'Street furniture' had to be cleared in advance for the route from Southampton to Oxfordshire. As it happened lockdown was an unexpected benefit as it meant the huge convoy could do the journey in one phase, because it wasn't competing with much other road traffic at the beginning of April!

From lockdown, I was disappointed that I couldn't be taking photos from one of the bridges en-route but my colleague Isabel did such an amazing job with these shots. It must have been very exciting to see, with all the police vehicles escorting.

Once at RAL the 6 sections of chamber were stored on our empty car park for a while before the builders and engineers were ready for it to be put into its final spot in our enormous new building. It was interesting to watch over the webcam while I was working from home a few weeks ago.

There's the first section being manoeuvred into position and to start putting the 16m x 18m vacuum chamber back together...

..piece...

So shiny and beautiful

by...piece..

And voila!

Paul, Isabel and Vishal

There it is - the finished article, after so many months of preparation.

From the inside

And now the building can finish being built around it! There's a lot more work to do yet...before testing can start in 2022. I'm so pleased for the technical team that it all went so well. And special thanks to Vishal Francis and Isabel Martinez for the photos.

BBC Article, if you're interested

I only visited the allotment once last week - a quick lunchtime visit. I mostly sat in the sun and said hello to people, while Jamie planted out the courgette plants. We also put a bit of protection around the Gigantes  beans which have now germinated (hooray!). The peppers and tomato plants are also in the ground - good timing as we had some torrential rain after they were planted out. And on another visit Jamie saw our frog is still around; Can you spot him? He is in there :-)

This song is provided by The Last Shadow Puppets, I hadn't heard them before, it's the chap from the Arctic Monkeys.