After only 14 months of construction, the PLATO hall has now been officially completed at space company OHB's headquarters in Bremen. With a floor area of around 1,400 sqm, the ISO 8 cleanroom, which is almost 11m high, is the OHB Group's largest cleanroom facility.
About 2,000 cubic meters of concrete and 440 tonnes of steel were needed for the construction of the integration hall. Office space with a floor area of a further 1,900 sqm has been built directly adjacent to the cleanroom facility. The construction project has a budget of around €15 million.
Since the building permit was granted in March 2019, more than 200 operatives have been working on the construction project. Craftswomen and men, as well as architecture and planning offices, faced a tight schedule to ensure that satellite projects can now be implemented in the ISO 8 cleanroom.
"I am very proud of the craftsmen and planners involved in the construction. It was quite a challenge to complete this hall in such a short period of time. My thanks also go to all the OHB employees who supervised the construction project," says OHB Chief Executive Officer, Marco Fuchs.
The team working on the MTG (Meteosat Third Generation) weather satellite project will be the first to move into the five-storey building complex. Looking forward, four of the MTG flight models will be integrated in the PLATO hall. Work will also be continued on the Heinrich Hertz communication satellite project there.
The planning team attached great importance to sustainable design in the construction project. Thus, all the heating supplies for the building are provided by the local waste heat and power plant. Similarly, refrigeration is handled via a modern refrigeration centre, which uses an environmentally friendly coolant.
The new building complex is called PLATO, a symbolic act that marks the commissioning of OHB System by the European Space Agency (ESA) as the main industrial contractor for its next major scientific mission PLATO.