3,2,1…

Skyrora are bringing space exploration to the UK for the first time
By Ella Joyce | 20 April 2022

UK-based satellite company Skyrora is set to be the first to launch on British soil this year – and the first in Europe – armed with a constellation of satellites that are primed to connect, inform and explore. A leading name in the NewSpace market, Skyrora are ready to blaze a trail, designing, manufacturing and launching satellites that influence our day-to-day life: beaming directly into your GPS apps and environmental reports. Business operations manager Derek Harris is at the forefront of the company’s mission: as the privatised space sector is becoming populated by commercial giants, Skyrora’s intention is to bring space backdown to Earth.

Ella Joyce: Can you tell me how Skyrora came about?
Derek Harris: I’ve pretty much been there from the beginning, but right at the very beginning it would’ve been Volodymyr [Levykin] our CEO, who spotted there was a market for small satellites needing to launch. At that time you only really had Rocket Lab [an American aerospace manufacturer] looking at filling this market, there was no one in Europe but there were thousands and thousands of satellites waiting to be launched. There was a big backlog so he decided he wanted to get into this marketplace. Fast-forward a little bit, he moves his plans forward quite quickly and brings on his directors, and then the next step was to open up the office and start to hire in. So we were in the enviable position that, at that point, his funding was looking to hiring engineers. I think what you find with a lot of projects similar to these is engineering projects need funding because there are a lot of good ideas that can sometimes fall down, but in this case, we were able to go in and hire the people that we wanted to help push this project forward. We brought in some of the greatest minds with the best rocketry experience in the UK. That was in about 2018. I was asked at the time if I would do some contracting work and help set up the office and culture. For the first year or so there was about seven of us in a small office on the third floor of an old Victorian building in Edinburgh – it was quite funny, I was sitting on a water pump at one point which was incredibly uncomfortable. Four years ago we were in this tiny office, now we have actual hardware – vehicles built – and we’re ready to go.

EJ: And what would you say is the primary ambition for the company?
DH: To serve the satellite market from an economic business point of view. We also want to try and bring things back to the normal person on the street. As we developed, we realised that many [people outside the industry] didn’t realise what space was doing for them. You were seeing the likes of Extinction Rebellion start to speak about the launch sites and how damaging they would be, but when we’re thinking about it, how did they find the launch site? They used their sat-nav to get there. Where does the information from the sat-nav come from? It came from the satellites. So there was quite a big disconnect about what space actually does for people. We’ve started to push the message that obviously we’re not like Elon Musk, we’re not going for Mars – as much fun as that could be, that’s not our main aim. A lot of the clients we’re recruiting are Earth observations with environmental purposes, they’re looking at deforestation, wildfires, flooding. I’m sure there’s even one that tracks endangered penguins. This is one aspect we explain to people. Then when you explain to them we’re putting communication satellites up or something – what does that mean? Well, who doesn’t use Alexa, Siri, sat-nav or Pokémon Go for the kids… or adults? [laughs] These sort of things are basically ingrained in us now as a society. How many people walk down the street with a set of headphones on listening to Spotify? The end game is, once everyone knows what space is and how it’s used, hopefully new applications will emerge to help drive things forward. Our end game for this is to be able to supply and get that data up there so we can help back on Earth, but also make sure people are aware this is why it’s being done.

EJ: Sustainability appears to be a core value, can you tell me a bit about the research that goes into making your work sustainable?
DH: What we’re seeing now [in the UK] is collaboration, back in the earlier days you might have got some collaboration between data companies and satellite companies, but what we’re now seeing is both working together. For example, there’s a satellite company that asked if they could use our green fuel to fuel their satellites, which is of course what we’re aiming for. The sector is coming together to try and envisage ways to change this, so they’re looking at the environment and the collaboration for net-zero in space and net-zero on Earth, the only way we can try and fix our environment is by collaborating.

“Our end game for this is to be able to supply and get that data up there so we can help back on Earth, but also make sure people are aware this is why it’s being done.”

EJ: In May of last year the UK government announced that the country will develop space launch capability – was government legislation the main reason space travel hadn’t begun earlier in the UK?
DH: I would say that was part of it – obviously if you don’t have the regulations in place you can’t do anything properly – but I think it would’ve been the tail end of the Black Arrow programme [a British satellite carrier rocket developed during the 1960s] which curtailed all this back in 1971. They were told to tear up everything they’d done, put it in a skip and just set it on fire. If you look at that project, it basically would have been the best non-launcher vehicle made, it is ideal for what was going to be done and would still work in the market today. As a country, we decided not to sign up with ESA [European Space Agency] and started using American vehicles, we stopped any further research going into it and, at that point, the UK lost their way a little bit. I think now, because they’ve started to look into the politics of it all with Brexit, they’ve realised we’re not going to have the same access as we did. That’s where the problem has been, the regulations have only been part of it, and it’d be too easy to have a kick at the government. It has taken too long to get here, but given the situation with the pandemic, I think they’ve done a great job.

EJ: It’s an exciting time. On the human side, how do you feel we can benefit from the progressive future of space exploration?
DH: I think that splits into two answers, from the space exploration side it’s looking at the past to see where we go in the future. Past missions that NASA has done have helped us bring through everything from pens and pencils to medical machines that do CAT scans and sensors for aviation. It could be that, from asteroid mining let’s say, we find new minerals that might replace things and technology that comes out of it may help medically. On the human side, I think we’ll begin to understand a lot more, if we start looking at asteroids we might have information from the Big Bang, which will give our universities and scientists more to work with. If they’re able to look back at other things and understand those, what else can we do? Natural disasters for example, if we improve our sensors, how much more time can we give to people in case of tsunamis? It is going to be that knock-on effect, it’s not just fun and games or being able to track your car going down the motorway.

EJ: Mankind has always had a fascination with space travel that comes from a deep-rooted sense of adventure. Have you any personal hopes for how far we can go in our lifetime?
DH: I have to admit, I have thought about it on a few occasions. When I grew up, being an astronaut wasn’t number one on my list of what I’d become, but looking at all the sci-fi movies, you can’t help wondering what’s beyond our borders. I’m a big nut when it comes to aliens and intelligent life, the amount of planets and galaxies that exist, there just has to be other things out there. It doesn’t mean they’re going to look like us, or like little green men, these sort of life forms could be something as simple as different types of animals and, for me, that’s what I hope to see going forward – exploration. We’ve basically explored the world and even now we still discover five or ten new species in the jungle every year. I also think the more we push into space, we’ll also be able to do it in the oceans. The biggest thing was the James Webb satellite which was launched recently, I think that’s going to be a big kickstart once it starts to fire information back, it’s going to spark a new generation of people saying, “What about this? What about that? What’s beyond this? I wonder how this happened?” That’s where my passion and geekiness points to.

EJ: What vehicles are you set to launch this year?
DH: We have Skylark L which is a suborbital and the main vehicle Skyrora XL is the actual orbital vehicle, they’re both being marked up to fly this year depending on licences and such.

EJ: What is the process leading up to that launch? And what are the aims of the vehicles that will be launching?
DH: Suborbital vehicles like Skylark L allow us to do a lot of checks on our equipment and a lot of what goes into Skylark L goes into XL, it’s just a smaller version of it. The actual L will allow us to have some zero gravity experiments on there too. At the moment, if you want to do zero-gravity experiments it’s either a very long waiting list to get onto the ISS [International Space Station] or to use a drop tower, we’re hoping we can make this financially feasible so governments can use it as an option going forward. The XL, on the other hand, is going to be our main workhorse that’s going to take the satellites up there, so the process for both of these is very similar. It all goes through rigorous testing, at the heart of it is safety because for something with 20,000 parts it only takes one to go wrong for something catastrophic to happen. The amount of effort and technical ability that goes into making sure everything is fine ranges from 3D printing the engines to integrating fuel tanks, they go through layers and layers of testing before they get to the finish point. Then the last real stage is the static test, the only thing we don’t do is unclamp it and let it go.

EJ: You received support from the European Space Agency which is an amazing prospect, has that helped speed up your process to become the first UK company to launch in Europe?
DH: Certainly, we’re aiming to be the first European company full stop. Once Skylark L is launched it should be the first successful European launcher, or small launcher, in the new space race. ESA has really helped us upscale the facility and my understanding now is ESA were very impressed, we move at such a quick pace, especially for an engineering company. Their support has allowed us to push forward with the programme, not just technically but also on the business side of things.

“It doesn’t mean they’re going to look like us, or like little green men, these sort of life forms could be something as simple as different types of animals and, for me, that’s what I hope to see going forward – exploration.”

EJ: In a market where rocket launches are becoming more commercialised through the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson developing their own form of private space travel, where does Skyrora fit in that arena?
DH: I’m going to steal a quote from one of my colleagues here actually: “We’re a competitor in the same way that Irn-Bru is a competitor to Coca Cola.” [laughs] Coca Cola sells worldwide, everyone knows it just like everyone knows SpaceX and it’s number one in every market apart from Scotland, in Scotland the only drink that outsells Coca Cola is Irn-Bru. So for us, we want to replicate that type of success but in Europe for rockets, why do we need to send satellites all the way from Germany to the United States to launch? Why can’t we send them to the UK? Musk, NASA and Blue Origin all have larger vehicles, they can all carry large satellites but what we’re looking for is whole Earth orbit vehicles, which are basically secondary thoughts for the others. I don’t see them as competitors as such, we’re more of a bespoke service.

EJ: The New Space market is a relatively new territory set to reinvent the traditional space industry supply chain, why do you think there was a need for this new way of thinking?
DH: I think it goes back to social responsibility. A while ago we launched something called the Prospero principles and you’ve also had the Paris Peace Forum recently and they’re all speaking about the same thing – what is our responsibility? Black Arrow in the 70s launched the Prospero satellite, it’s been out there since then but it’s no longer in use, so we have this satellite that’s just floating there in orbit doing nothing. It’s now technically debris, so it’s our responsibility to say we need to get this done, and that’s where the New Space is coming from. You’ve got the likes of us and Astroscale looking at having smaller satellites out there being less congested and trying to clean it up, when NASA or Roscosmos launched over the last 50 years, what they were leaving behind was never a priority. The best example of that was after the Americans landed on the moon, we know there are bags of human waste still left out there, we don’t want to be doing that to our own orbit. I think New Space is really trying to get an early push to say whole Earth orbits are incredibly important to us as well, if we mess them up that’s it. It’s looking at the generation before and saying “What can we do better?”

EJ: Finally, do you have a Neil Armstrong-esque line ready to say when you do launch the first rocket?
DH: I think at this point I will be well and truly away from any microphone, every launch we’ve done so far has been full of expletives from myself. Normally along the lines of “Thank blank for that!” [laughs] We don’t have an official one as of yet but I’m sure that when it comes time to launch our PR team will have something they want to say. Hopefully, it will be something that can reverberate for history.

Interview originally published inside HERO 27.
Keep up-to-date with Skyrora here.

TAGGED WITH


Read Next