OHB placing the largest clean room in operation

Mission accomplished: Architekt Arne Schlichtmann übergibt den symbolischen Schlüssel an Marco Fuchs, den Vorstandsvorsitzenden von OHB (v. l.). Damit nimmt OHB offiziell den größten Reinraum der Unternehmensgruppe in Betrieb. © OHB / Mission accomplished: Architect Arne Schlichtmann hands over a symbolic key to Marco Fuchs, CEO of OHB (from left). With this symbolic act OHB officially completes construction of the OHB Group's largest clean room. © OHB

Vom Entwurf ... © OHB, Kaars/Schlichtmann / From the draft ... © OHB, Kaars/Schlichtmann

... in nur 14 Monaten zum fertigen ISO-8-Reinraum. Mit 1400 Quadratmetern ist die Intergrationshalle die größte der Unternehmensgruppe. © OHB / ... to the officially completed ISO-8 cleanroom after only 14 months of construction. With a floor area of around 1,400 square meters it is is the OHB Group’s largest cleanroom facility. © OHB

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 square meters, the ISO 8 cleanroom*, which is almost eleven meters high, is the OHB Group’s largest cleanroom facility. About 2,000 cubic meters of concrete and 440 tons of steel were needed for the construction of the integration hall. Office space with a floor area of a further 1,900 square meters has been built directly adjacent to the cleanroom facility. The construction project has a budget of around EUR 15 million.

Since the building permit was granted in March 2019, more than 200 operatives have been working on the construction project. Craftsmen and women 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 center, which uses an environmentally friendly coolant.

The new building complex is called PLATO, a symbolic act that marks the commissioning of OHB System AG by the European Space Agency ESA as the main industrial contractor for its next major scientific mission PLATO.

* The ISO 8 purity class stipulates that one cubic meter of air may contain only a maximum of 30,000 particles that are larger than 5 micrometers in size. One micrometer corresponds to one millionth of a meter; by contrast, a single human hair is 50 micrometers thick.