Skyrora intent on being the UK’s first vertical launch company of choice.

“He saw that Edinburgh was home to some very good companies working with space data and Glasgow with satellites and that what the UK needed was appropriate launch vehicles to really enable it to get going,” Smith says.

From the outset, Skyrora has set its sights on being the UK’s vertical launch company of choice, and beyond that, to provide small payload launch capacity for global clients.

“We took proven technology from two of Britain’s cancelled rocket programmes, Skylark and Black Arrow, brought in some modern innovations such as 3D printing and advanced materials and set up our HQ in Edinburgh, with production facilities dotted around the UK and Europe. We are adopting a step-by-step approach, starting with suborbital launch vehicles, learning from these and moving quickly towards orbital launches,” he says.

Skyrora CEO Volodymyr Levykin, and the company’s business development director, Daniel Smith

The company is agnostic on launch sites but has a good relationship with each potential spaceport, supporting their activity with trajectory analysis and weather data. “Up North, the weather can be rough. Wind is the main issue and it can be expected to delay UK launches time and again. We are deliberately focusing on hydrogen peroxide and kerosene as our fuel.

“A lot of our competitors use cryogenics but this is difficult to handle. The propellant we are using has the great advantage of being stored at ambient temperatures. This means it can be fuelled and ready to go whenever a launch window opens,” Smith explains.

This is the same propellant combination used in the UK’s only successful rocket launch vehicle, Black Arrow. This was developed in the 1960s and was used for four launches between 1961 and 1971, from the Woomera Launch site in Australia.

The rocket’s final flight was the UK’s only successful orbital launch and was responsible for placing the Prospero satellite into low Earth orbit. Black Arrow was a three-stage rocket, fuelled by kerosene and a concentrated form of hydrogen peroxide.

The remains of the first stage of the successful Black Arrow launch were recovered from the Anna Creek cattle station and displayed at the William Creek Memorial Park in Australia.

Skyrora’s in-house educational outreach team saw the potential for building enthusiasm and awareness of the UK’s renewed commitment to space among school children and the Scottish public and had Black Arrow recovered from Australia and brought home to the UK in January, where it was unveiled on Burns’ Night in front of 120 space industry leaders in Smith’s hometown of Penicuik. It was then on display at the Scottish Parliament in mid-March as MPs debated the Space initiative.

Skyrora’s latest innovation is less technologically focused and more designed around how they company can ensure their future satellite customers, for whom they already have a stack of Letters of Intent with, can start the paperwork and specific launch requirements for their future orbital activity. The company has set up an entity named ‘Responsive Access’ to act as a booking system for the payloads that Skyrora, and other micro-launchers, can take into space.

“This is all about giving small satellite customers a ‘one stop-shop’ to speed up the entire process of getting spacecraft into orbit. The new company will do everything from refining the slow contractual processes to offering practical help with headaches like arranging testing facilities and insurance coverage,” Smith says.

He points out that it is important to realise that Skyrora’s rockets are not just engineering drawings on a drawing board. “Our main launch vehicle, Skyrora XL, is 24 metres tall and just short of two metres in diameter. We’ve already 3D printed and tested the upper stage engines, with a first stage prototype in development.

But rather than spending three years just working on that rocket, we’ve adopted a step-by-step approach to de-risk as much as we can and gain something the UK currently doesn’t have much – real launch experience. We carried out our first test launch on our micro-rocket, Skylark Nano at the end of August,” he notes.

The Nano was launched from land at Kildermorie, north-west of Evanton, in Easter Ross. Despite being just nine feet in length, it accelerated to Mach 1.45 and reached a height of six kilometres, allowing the company to test a range of elements from avionics to payload deployment. Skyrora’s next rocket, the two-stage Skylark Micro, is designed to reach a height of 40 kilometres, and the launch is scheduled imminently. The Micro is four metres in height but will again let the company test various features, as well as further establish its relationship with insurers and the CAA.

This summer, the company plans to launch the six-metre long hydrogen peroxide hybrid, SkyHy, which will go to 100 kilometres crossing the Karman line, the first time a UK company will ever reached space from British soil.

“If all goes to plan with our SkyHy space launch, we hope to move on to our final developmental launch by the start of next year.

The SK-1 is the little brother of our main orbital vehicle, using the same propellant combination and standing at 14m tall. We’re already having meetings with the UK Space Agency and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to talk over all of our remaining test launches, while at the same time testing engines and finalising designs to ensure that our orbital vehicle will be ready to launch its first satellites when a UK spaceport is in place.” he notes.

Business HQ was launched to space as part of its sector focus on the Scottish Space Sector, out on the 21st March 2019

This article appeared in the 21st March edition of Business HQ, click HERE to read in full. 

According to Smith, the company plans to carry out somewhere between six and 12 launches a year for clients.

Despite being under two years old, Skyrora already has over twenty staff in the UK, as well as around a hundred more supporting the business in Slovakia and Ukrainian subsidiaries.

In addition to its flagship Princes Street HQ in Edinburgh, it also has a new production facility in Loanhead and a rocket engine test installation in Cornwall, in the same place where the Bloodhound Supersonic Car tested its hydrogen peroxide engines. Skyrora’s engines are all currently 3D printed in the UK. “The 3D printing is great for prototyping an engine. It gives us fantastic control of the build process but it takes a long time. We are still considering if it is a viable approach when we need to build dozens of these engines, or if we will move combine 3D printing with more traditional manufacturing techniques” adds Smith.