Scotland's space industry prepares to go into orbit

Tucked away at the back of an industrial estate less than a mile down the road where Barr’s Irn-Bru is made in Cumbernauld from a secret recipe dating back to 1901 sits the unassuming manufacturing facility of Skyrora.

From outside there is nothing particularly striking about the building, apart from its size. But getting in requires a safety briefing, signatures across non-disclosure agreements, and passage through secure entries before donning protective footwear for a tour around this NewSpace rocket production facility.

“NewSpace” refers to the emerging commercial space sector, a rapidly expanding global industry in which Scotland is rather discreetly building up a foothold spanning launch facilities, rocket launch vehicles, satellite manufacturing, and downstream companies using the data gathered from orbit to provide an array of services to improve life on Earth.

“There’s a perception of space that’s very limited to launch - astronauts or Mars missions,” says Daniel Smith, chief executive of Edinburgh-based AstroAgency.

“For me, space isn’t about that at all. It’s about placing small sensors to protect us from above by detecting wildfires, measuring soil moisture to prevent landslides, using radar to check crops for disease, monitoring coastal erosion and melting ice caps, identifying illegal fishing, mining or people trafficking or tracking endangered species.”

Mr Smith and his partner, chief operating officer Daria Filichkina, set up AstroAgency in 2019 to provide strategic marketing dedicated exclusively to the commercial space sector. To date it has delivered projects for more than 50 private clients around the world, ranging from start-ups to some of the biggest names in the sector, as well as national space agencies and economic development bodies.

Consultancy group McKinsey has projected that the global space industry will be worth nearly £800 billion by 2030. Owning even a fraction of that market could transform the economy in Scotland, where space-related activities currently generate more than £250 million in annual revenues and employ about 8,500 people in upstream and downstream space activity.

This “end-to-end” capability in Scotland is the aspect that most excites the sector’s supporters. The key question is whether the companies based here will be able to capitalise on this and grow big enough to compete with larger rivals on the global stage.

“We’ve got it all in Scotland – a strong upstream (satellites and rockets) and downstream (data and applications) ecosystem, a highly educated workforce, and excellent research institutions,” says Allan Cannon, co-founder of Glasgow-based satellite communications specialist Krucial.

“The ecosystem is developing at pace and more and more organisations are starting or locating their businesses here in Scotland to take advantage of that talent, the support, and the investment available.”

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Significantly, the benefits could extend well beyond the central belt into remote and rural areas very much in need of an economic boost.

Five of the UK’s seven declared spaceports are in Scotland, and of these four are in the Highlands and Islands. One of them is in Sutherland, a project initially headed up by Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) with the facility now leased to Moray rocket firm Orbex.

The launch pad site on the A’ Mhoine peninsula is expected to employ 40 people and create more than 200 further job opportunities across the Highlands and Islands. An economic impact assessment carried out for HIE concluded that the spaceport has the potential to generate nearly £1bn of GVA (gross value added) for the area’s economy over the next 30 years.

“I’ve been involved with economic development for a number of years, and you rarely ever get to see figures of £1bn impact, so it’s really significant,” said Peter Guthrie, project manager for vertical launch at HIE.

“And again, 40 jobs might not sound like much in Edinburgh or Glasgow, but I can tell you it’s a lot in Sutherland, and that is true of other spaceports as well, the one in Unst particularly.”

The Launch Pads

The space industry in Scotland is generally regarded as a close-knit community but that does not mean it has lacked controversy.

The Shetland Space Centre on Unst, also known as the SaxaVord Spaceport, is located on the northernmost of the inhabited British Isles. It currently has 60 full-time employees and chief executive Frank Strang says it is “within weeks” of getting critical licencing from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to launch 30 space missions per year.

SaxaVord’s biggest shareholder is Anders Povlsen, a Danish fashion industry billionaire who is also one of Scotland’s largest landowners. His estates include those adjoining the Melness Estate where the Sutherland spaceport is being built.

Debbie and Frank Strang of SaxaVord Spaceport (Image: SaxaVord)

In 2020 Mr Povlsen’s hotel management company Wildland Limited filed an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit to stop construction of Sutherland Spaceport. His support for SaxaVord amid a lawsuit against Sutherland caused an uproar with accusations of hypocrisy levelled against Mr Povlsen.

Mr Strang said £33m of private money has been spent so far and fundraising is continuing as SaxaVord looks to raise a further £40m after a US-based investor defaulted on the provision of a loan facility. The funding gap is the latest obstacle in what began in 2018 as a regeneration project to bring the former Royal Air Force Saxa Vord radar station back into use.

“It’s been a horrible journey at times, and there are still a lot of challenges,” he said. “We have no public money, we’ve had to raise the money ourselves, we’ve kissed a few frogs, we’ve been let down by funders, [but] we’ve also had some tremendous support from Wildland and Anders Povlsen and others which has allowed us to get to the point where we are now.”

There is only one live spaceport application with the CAA at the moment, Mr Strang said, and it is SaxaVord’s. With approval seemingly imminent, the facility’s three launch pads are due to host two sub-orbital launches for Germany’s HyImpulse next year, as well as another full orbital launch with Rocket Factory, another German launch services provider.

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Mr Strang added that he “genuinely believes” SaxaVord will within four or five years be applying for a variation to its CAA licence to increase annual launches as the number of satellites in low Earth orbit is set to surge from 12,500 to between 130,000 and 150,000 by 2030.

“We are in dialogue with 13 launch providers, and we can only take probably four or five,” he said. “We are under contract with two and in contract dialogue with another two, so we are full.

“There are others who will need to go somewhere. Whether they will go to other sites in the Highlands – I don’t know. It’s all to do with airspace and the spaceport licence, and the spaceport licence is a very complex document.”

Orbex took responsibility for the operational management of Sutherland Spaceport in November of last year, and construction got underway in May. Chief executive Martin Coates said work so far has included the creation of the site entry and a section of the site access road, along with local improvements that were part of the planning application. Future work will focus on creating the launch pad area, the full site access road and associated facilities.

Orbex also recently applied to Highland Council for permission to change the layout and design of the spaceport that will “primarily” be within the same footprint as the existing scheme and will help further address environmental concerns that have been raised. A new community consultation is planned in conjunction with the proposed changes.

Martin Coates, Orbex (Image: Orbex)

In the Outer Hebrides, planning permission was granted in July for up to 10 sub-orbital launches per year at Scolpaig Farm on North Uist despite significant local opposition. The project is led by Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, the Western Isles council, which bought the farm for £1m and is developing it with private military contractor QinetiQ and space industry firms Rhea Group and Commercial Space Technologies.

In Argyll, commercial launch service operator Discover Space UK (DSUK) has been awarded grant funding from the UK Space Agency to develop a propulsion test and research facility at Machrihanish Airbase. A joint venture with the local community, DSUK’s stated mission is “to provide unique space access services outside of traditional orbital launch to complete the UK’s national spaceflight infrastructure”.

At Prestwick Airport there are plans to develop horizontal launch capability as part of the wider Ayrshire Growth Deal’s 10-year programme of investment into the local aerospace cluster. This is where Mangata Networks, a US-based developer of satellite-enabled cloud services, has announced plans to open a manufacturing, research and development hub that is expected to eventually employ up to 575 people.

The Rockets

Build it, destroy it, build it again.

This is a recurring theme as projects team head Euan Clark leads a tour around Skyrora’s operations in Cumbernauld. Billed as the UK’s largest rocket manufacturing facility when it opened in July 2022, the site covers the area of two standard football pitches and will be able to accommodate up to 16 Skyrora XL vehicles for assembly, integration and launch per annum when the company reaches full production.

Chief executive Volodymyr Levykin – whose career in IT took him from Ukraine to Scotland and then the US, and then back to Scotland when he switched into the space sector – said the company is hoping to launch its next Skylark vehicle from Shetland. However, this hinges on getting permission from the CAA.

The first Skylark launch attempt in October 2022 took place in Iceland. Skyrora has applications with both countries for the next liftoff that it hopes will take place next year. The location will be determined by which set of authorities is first to grant approval.

“The vehicle itself is ready, it was ready months ago,” Mr Levykin said. “Now it is paperwork and permissions and such. Based on our experience, [this] is even more difficult than the rocket science.”

Euan Clark is production lead at Skyrora's facility in Cumbernauld (Image: Gordon Terris)

The elephant in the room of rocket launchers is of course Elon Musk’s SpaceX, whose frequent blastoffs dominate the global industry and have delivered thousands of satellites to create Starlink, the world’s largest satellite constellation using low Earth orbit to deliver broadband internet service.

SpaceX’s Starships are much larger than Skyrora’s vehicles, and thus customers who hitch a ride can benefit from lower costs per kilo of payload. The Scottish company is therefore targeting the niche of the dedicated launch.

“The ride share model which SpaceX uses, it’s similar to the bus,” Mr Levykin explains. “The customers need to wait for the launch, they need to co-exist in the same vehicle, which means synchronising the technical requirements…and then SpaceX launches them all from one location – whatever location is preferable for SpaceX themselves.”

Noting that in most cases customers require varying trajectories to reach the orbit that suits their purposes, he continues with the road vehicle analogy: “They have to walk to their final destinations, which takes time and is expensive, and not all of them have legs, by which I’m talking about the satellite propulsion systems.

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“So that’s why at Skyrora we are trying to provide the taxi service – a dedicated taxi for the dedicated passenger. Yes, the ride will be more expensive for the passenger, but the overall cost if you take into account the waiting time on the ground, the waiting time on the orbit, movement to the right orbit by yourself – [then] the overall cost will be quite attractive.”

Orbex, which employs more than 150 people from its base in Moray, will also offer dedicated launch services on its Orbex Prime rocket. The plan is for these to take off from its own launch pad in Sutherland. This is in contrast to SaxaVord, which does not make rockets and will serve as a launch base for multiple space vehicle manufacturers.

To date Orbex has signed commercial launch contracts with seven customers, among them UK-based Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) and Swiss-based Astrocast.

“We chose Sutherland because it offers secure access to a range of orbits, including high inclination [low Earth orbit], polar orbits, and sun synchronous orbits,” explains Mr Coats, the chief executive.

“The ability to target specific orbits is essential for various satellite functions, such as Earth observation or telecommunications. The sparse population in the region also ensures a low-risk flight path.”

The Satellites

Though small, Scotland is described as a powerhouse when it comes to producing the satellites that are the payload served by launch pads and rocket manufacturers.

“We are not the technology,” says Mr Strang of SaxaVord. “The real technology is in the rocket and the satellites.

“Our job is to build the spaceport to enable that technology to get into space. We are the picks and shovels of the California gold fields, not the gold miners.”

Glasgow produces the highest number of small satellites anywhere in Europe, and Craig Clark of Clyde Space is widely regarded as the visionary engineer who put this in motion.

In 2004 he set up the company and named it after the River Clyde that runs through the city, which has a history of shipbuilding dating back hundreds of years. There was no space sector in Scotland back then, but Mr Clark was keen to return to Scotland after 11 years of leading a power systems team at Surrey Satellite Technology in England.

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Clyde Space was acquired by Sweden’s AAC Microtec in 2018 in a deal valued at the time at approximately £28m, and the Glasgow facility remains the nucleus for the group’s satellite manufacturing operations.

Maureen Haverty, vice president and principal investor at London-listed investment group Seraphim Space, said the engineering talent available in Scotland has fed the country’s growing prowess in space.

“Satellite space needs more and more software engineers,” she said. “It’s really becoming a software-driven business, but if you are competing for software engineers in the US, particularly California, you are competing with really big tech companies who pay very high salaries.

“In Scotland you can get a wider variety of engineers at a price you can afford, and that definitely helps companies set up in the area and drives a lot of inward investment into Scotland.”

Theresa Condor is co-founder of Spire Global (Image: Contributed)

That was the case with Spire Global, the nanosatellite company headquartered in San Francisco which set up its lead centre for manufacturing in Glasgow in 2015. Currently employing more than 160 people in the UK, most of whom are in Scotland, Spire has to date built more than 150 satellites in Glasgow.

The atmospheric data collected by Spire is used by national weather centres such as the UK Met Office to produce the weather forecasts that pop up daily on mobile phones. The company also has business units serving the maritime, aviation and government sectors.

“Every single day, any person across the UK and Scotland that checks the weather forecast is benefitting from the data collected from Spire satellites,” said Theresa Condor, co-founder and chief operating officer of Spire.

The Data Crunchers

Shipping satellites into orbit is what drives revenues for the spaceports and rocket manufacturers. In turn, the driver of revenues for satellite manufacturers are the services supplied by these satellites, and the information they gather which is used for a vast and expanding array of purposes.

Ms Haverty of Seraphim Space notes that for decades “a lot of money” has been made in space in the fields of communications and global positioning systems (GPS) which are required, for example, in the delivery of SatNav information for drivers. However, there is much more to come.

“The industries that space fuels are much larger than space itself and so the further out you can go into [those] industries is where the opportunities are,” she said.

“The practical example of that is that SpaceX makes much more of its revenue and will make even more of its revenue from its Starlink communications constellation than it ever will from a launch. The launch is just an enabler.”

Omanos Analytics of Glasgow uses space data to monitor the impact of land use changes on Earth (Image: Omanos)

Set up in 2018, Glasgow-based Omanos Analytics combines space data with information gathered on the ground to monitor the social and environmental impacts of land use changes brought about by events such as industrial development, war, or climate change. Headed by co-founder and director Celia Davies, the company uses information gathered from orbit to support whistleblowers in human rights violations, climate damage, and conflict-related disputes.

“One thing I have really noticed since we set up is that the social purpose element used to be something that was seen almost as a disadvantage, like that is something that will probably mean you don’t end up becoming profitable, whereas now it is seen as an asset,” she said.

“We have found a niche in the market in the space ecosystem [so we want to] really scale what we do across different use cases and continue to help mitigate some of the risks we are facing.”

In Edinburgh, Celestia UK is making technical solutions for the ground segment of the space industry. The Scottish office, set up in 2018, employs 30 people specialising in the development of phased array antennas that relay data from space back to Earth.

“Normally when you talk about [satellite communications] everyone thinks of the big dishes pointing to the sky, but we do it differently,” Celestia UK chief executive Malachy Devlin said. “We do it electronically.

“SpaceX are looking at launching a rocket every two and a half days on average next year, so you’re starting to look at 2,500 satellites going up into space in a year, and you need one of those satellite dishes to track each of those in different parts of the world.

“What we can do is take a whole field of those mechanical dishes and collapse it into a relatively small box probably the size of a small caravan. It’s over 50 satellites we can track, and that’s all controlled by software.”