Skyrora: boldly go, in careful steps

Edinburgh-based start-up helping launch Scotland's space industry

Whoever said space is the final frontier had a great feel for drama and a view to the cosmos, but perhaps didn’t see as far out as the 21st Century. Because while space people are once again talking urgently about the Moon and beyond, the real action is all here on Earth – where there are many frontiers.

One of those cutting-edge places is Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital and home of a company that hopes to take an early lead in a new space race to put the United Kingdom in the rocket launching business. I spoke to Robin Hague, head of launch at Skyrora, and he’s optimistic that the in-development three-stage XL orbital vehicle will fly as planned in 2023 – or just maybe before end-2022.

A UK rocket race is a four-way affair, and “first” may amount to little more than bragging rights. The real prizes are all further out, but if a longstanding UK government objective is realised, launch from one or more UK spaceports will be one pillar of a fast-growing domestic space industry with a target of commanding 10% of the global space market by 2030 - potentially worth, by London’s reckoning, ￡40bn in direct revenue.

Two of Skyrora’s rivals are imports. California-headquartered Virgin Orbit’s air-launched system is yet to fly successfully but signed up to offer its 747-based service from Cornwall. Lockheed Martin is contracted to operate a UK spaceport in the Shetland Islands and is expected to bring a version of the in-operation Electron developed by US-New Zealand start-up Rocket Lab, in which LM is a “strategic investor”.

The fourth player is Orbex, which in 2018 won a ￡5.5m UK government grant to establish manufacturing facilities near Inverness. The company also has a design facility in Denmark, where its biopropane-fuelled engines are being made. Orbex is pointing to a maiden flight in the autumn of 2022. That goal looks to be on target financially, with completion this month of a $24m funding round that saw UK investor BGF and European venture capital group Octopus Ventures join existing investors High-Tech Gründerfonds, Heartcore Capital and Elecnor, the parent company Deimos Space; this latest round included a €2.5 million grant from the European Horizon 2020 SME Instrument programme.

One suspects Hague would very much like to “win” this particular space race. But his sense of mission, and history, is long-term, so for now he makes clear that he and his colleagues - including at what the company has described as a “co-working centre” in Dnipro, Ukraine, where rocket engineering expertise dates to Soviet times – are focussed on the immediate task of getting to first flight and establishing an operating launch business.

And launch, he notes, is the missing part of the UK’s space proposition. Or, it’s the missing link today: “Of course the UK is sadly unique in being the only country to have developed an orbital capability and abandoned it, so it’s really what we’re missing.”

Hague refers to the UK’s Black Arrow project, which flew from Woomera test range in Australia between 1969 and 1971 – before being axed, in part because the British government reckoned it would be cheaper to buy launches from the USA. But in one key aspect, Black Arrow lives on at Skyrora. One of the company’s key selling points is its hydrogen peroxide-kerosene fuel, a mix that was well explored in the abandoned launcher project.

Hydrogen peroxide-kerosene cannot match liquid oxygen-hydrogen for performance but has the huge advantage of not being cryogenic. That is, when fickle weather at any of the Scottish locations being considered for vertical-launch spaceports keeps a fueled-and-ready rocket grounded, Skyrora will be able to simply wait for conditions to improve, rather than go through the time-consuming and costly exercise of de-fueling and storing a cryogenic load. Easy stop and restart in flight is another key advantage of this fuel, for precision payload placement.

And, as head of engineering Jack James “JJ” Marlow explained to your correspondent earlier this year, hydrogen peroxide-kerosene is also very dense, so combined with the mass advantages of extensive 3D printing, Skylark XL may go a long way towards solving the “small launcher problem” of fuel and vehicle mass consuming payload capacity.

Taking fuel a step further, Skyrora has developed, in-house, a proprietary process for turning waste plastic into kerosene. The “Ecosene” process takes 24h to turn 1,000kg of plastic into 600kg of kerosene – to fuel rockets, aircraft or for any other application, potentially from a compact plant installable anywhere.

Meanwhile, that plastic-to-kerosene fuel featured in ground testing – at a Skyrora facility in the Scottish Highlands – of the 3t-thrust engine that will power its single-stage, suborbital Skylark L. That vehicle, says Hague, is ready to fly, which he hopes to see in the next six to eight months. “SKL”, he adds, is a “developmental stepping stone” to the orbital XL, which at 22m will stand about twice as tall and carry a nominal payload of 315kg to a 500km low-Earth orbit.

Skylark L ground test, May 2020, at Kildemorie Estate in north Scotland - first UK ground test at scale since Black Arrow (photo: Skyrora)

Flying the SKL is part of a step-wise development plan which started with “quick and convenient, inexpensive tests” to verify launch procedures, communications, tracking and avionics. In August this year, that programme got as far as flying the two-stage, 4m-tall sub-orbital Skylark Micro, launched from Skyrora’s containerised mobile launch facility, set up in Iceland.

Before Micro came a smaller Nano. SKL, though, marked the leap from commercially available solid motors to a 3D-printed liquid-fuel engine which, says Hague, “is a very similar scale and shape to our 7t engine [for XL], which hopefully will have underground tests in the first part of 2021”.

That 7t engine, he adds, “is our turbopump engine, so that’s the next really big milestone for us, getting our turbopump ready. The real step into the front-rank of potential launch vehicles is having our own turbopump engine up and running.”

As with all “credible” launch vehicles, turbopump fuel feed is key to supplying the engine at high pressure without excessively strong and heavy tanks. “Having a pump engine means we can have a light and efficient vehicle.”

“[SKL] will be our first spaceflight, and it will employ all the same systems, actually bar the pump, as the orbital vehicle. So, it’s getting everything up and running in a smaller, simpler vehicle for the first time.”

Flying SKL will In effect be a dress rehearsal for XL, but the curtain may not fall on Skyrora as a suborbital launch operator. “We set out,” says Hague, “to create SKL purely as a developmental vehicle. Then, this market opportunity has been coming to us, because of the interest we’ve been getting in the potential of flying things on board it.

“I think it does depend on us being able to bring the same cost and convenience advantages we expect to bring to obit with XL, to suborbit with L.” Some of that convenience advantage may come through flying UK payloads from the UK, with no need to clear export hurdles.

But XL is the flagship. Its 315kg to LEO capacity places it between the smaller Rocket Lab Electron or Orbex Prime vehicles and Virgin Orbit’s 450kg-to-LEO LauncherOne. As for the XL niche, Hague says: “The choice of payload range came from our own market assessment of what we felt was the best combination.” XL will be big enough to give small spacecraft from, say, Surrey Satellites a dedicated ride, or provide rideshare services for even smaller satellites. “With our peroxide propulsion because it’s so easy to relight, we can provide a tailorable thrust to launch rather than just dropping everybody off in one spot.

“From what we see in the market, even with the [ultra-heavy SpaceX] Starship coming along, there’s plenty for other dedicated launchers to do. Spread across the globe providing the taxi service rather than the truck. That’s what we're looking towards.”

Skylark Micro launch, Iceland, August 2020 (photo: Skyrora)

?ALL ABOUT COST

Since no conversation about launch goes on very long without reference to SpaceX, Hague is obliged to address launch cost. Earlier this year Marlow indicated a target of around ￡20,000/kg payload to LEO, which would translate to around $25,000 or an XL per-flight ticket of maybe $8m in very round numbers. That kind of price aligns with other small vehicle operators like Rocket Lab or Virgin Orbit, but comes in at about 10 times the kg-to-LEO price of a Falcon 9 flight. Skyrora’s value proposition lies in rapid turnaround from contract to flight with precise control over launch date and final orbit. Restart will be a key capability for customers whose payloads would otherwise be “piggyback” rides on a large rocket. But in a competitive world, and even a potentially competitive UK launch market, price is going to be a factor.

Hague observes: “The [XL] vehicle itself is very much focused on manufacturability, but I think there will be opportunities there once we are producing a number of them, to find routes to further improve that manufacturability and simplify systems so that we can get cost savings back. We’re looking to be reasonably priced, we’re looking to be competitively priced for a small vehicle, because they’re always going to be more expensive, and then to provide an excellent holistic service overall, so that our offer is attractive in that way.”

Or is there the prospect of achieving the dramatic price reductions that could come from a bigger vehicle? The example that comes to mind being, of course, SpaceX – whose Falcon 9 is a “cluster” of Falcon 1s, while the Falcon Heavy is a cluster of Falcon 9s. Here, Hague sticks to the task at hand: “Our technology could be the basis for something bigger, but our focus is just to get XL up and running and operational as a business. I’m mindful that [SpaceX founder Elon] Musk said that they thought Falcon Heavy was going to be easy. But strapping them together became so difficult. I'm not sure what route we would pursue if we were to look to create something bigger.”

In any case, he stresses with confidence: “Once we’re established with production for XL we will have a formidable and capable organisation in place, that would be well-placed to then do something bigger. But at the moment there are no definite plans.”

While Skyrora attends to its first order of business, three external issues remain pressing. One of course is the Covid-19 pandemic. Coronavirus has “certainly slowed things down”, says Hague, but he adds: “We are fortunate in being a new organisation that has grown out of an IT business in the past [chief executive Volodymyr Levykin has a background in internet businesses - Ed] we are well-set up for distributed working. We have been able to move on with an awful lot of stuff separately, and we have got the space to manage safe distances and such when it comes down to the testing of the hardware work that we’ve got to get together.” That 2022-23 first-flight plan has remained stable.

A second issue beyond Skyrora’s control is UK law. The 2018 Space Industry Act was a landmark update of the 1986 Outer Space Act, which aligned UK law with international space conventions but created no legal structure in which a domestic launch industry could operate. The 2018 legislation created a regulatory framework for the expansion of commercial space activities and the development of a UK spaceport - but still needs secondary legislation to clarify critical issues such as any ceiling on liability for launch operators.

That secondary legislation will ultimately bear on establishment of one or more UK spaceports. As things stand, apart from Newquay Airport in Cornwall, which will host Virgin Orbit, there are three contenders for vertical launch, all across the top of Scotland: North Uist in the Hebrides, Sutherland on the mainland, and Unst (or Skor) in the Shetlands. “All three,” says Hague, “have their advantages and disadvantages. We have not as yet opted to select one in particular, but we’re cooperating with all three, we’re friends with all three, we’ve got good relations. We’re contributing information to their individual consultations, discussing operational approaches and such. Yes, we need a site, but we’re keen to see as many succeed as possible.”

He stresses that Skyrora’s design for a minimal ground infrastructure means that an XL flight from Scotland in 2022 could - “from an engineering point of view” - happen even if formal approval of a launch site didn’t come until into that year: “Our system does make us, we believe, uniquely flexible.” He adds: “But from the whole paperwork side it gets a lot more complicated, so we’d like to know as soon as possible.”

Iceland, which hosted this summer’s Skylark Micro flight, is conceivably an alternative. The country went within calendar 2020 from having no procedure to allow a launch to providing a framework for Skyrora to secure permission to operate the flight; the company credits the Icelandic government and Space Iceland - founded only in 2019 - with helping make the launch possible following a visit to the launch site in January this year.

Hague stresses, however, that “our continuing focus is to provide launch services from the UK. But we did have a very positive experience with Iceland, and the location has a lot to offer. It’s certainly somewhere we could consider operating in future, indeed in tandem with UK operations or, if worse came to worse, if the structure wasn't there either legislatively or logistically we could then look at operating from there.

“Our system is very modular. SKL in particular could be moved to almost anywhere. XL would need something a little bit more substantial, something that looks a bit more like Rocket Lab’s launch site in New Zealand.”

A third external issue is Brexit. The UK’s exit from the European Union, with real change coming with the 1 January 2021 end of the regulatory transition period, may not have much impact on space sector companies like Skyrora. For manufacturing or launch volumes of material crossing borders are small - unlike, say, what’s needed to keep a car factory running. And, much of that material is tightly controlled given civil-military dual-use potential. “So we don't anticipate too much of a problem, over the paperwork that we must go through anyway,” says Hague. 

“However we can see that just across the board it’s a disaster, it's going to cause all sorts of little bits of friction across the country, across the industry. So I think we will be ok because we're in this particular niche, but [there will be] headaches for us, while not fundamental ones.

Looking at the big picture, though, planning for operations from the UK looks like a good bet. Though mid-decade government hopes of having a spaceport up and running by 2018 proved optimistic, successive governments have pursued the goal. Hague sees a domestic launch capability as “a big advantage. The UK spacecraft industry has been very strong for a long time. So I think it does present a broader national opportunity to be able to provide a complete space mission within the UK, and indeed from our point of view from within Scotland itself.”

Hague points to spacecraft construction [around Clyde Space in Glasgow], space data handling [the University of Edinburgh describes itself as a “space university” at the centre of a technology hub] and downlink technology [University of Dundee spin-out STAR-Dundee is behind the SpaceWire on-board computer network, which gathers sensor data for transmission to ground stations]. “So if we can provide the access to space as well, then I think it opens up opportunities for UK organisations, for the UK government, for secure sovereign launch, and for UK businesses to provide space missions for clients from across the world, where they can come and get everything in one place.

“Obviously, the US can do that too!”

***

Dan Thisdell adds: I write about European spaceflight: industry, politics, science and money. After a long mid-career at Flight International, I am preparing to launch a newsletter for space industry investors. Watch this space and contact me via LinkedIn - especially if your company should be profiled.