A large band of battered metal has been placed on a stand at the entrance of Skyrora’s rocket manufacturing hall in Cumbernauld in central Scotland. Six feet in diameter, the loop is perforated, torn and twisted, a result of being blasted into space and then dropped on to the Australian outback where it has lain for almost 50 years until its recent recovery.
The ring is part of the remains of Britain’s only satellite launch, which took place on 28 October 1971 when a Black Arrow rocket placed a Prospero probe into orbit round the Earth. The programme was cancelled the same year.
But now the UK is preparing to return to the satellite-launching business as several rival companies vie for business with the aim, this time, of firing rockets from British, not antipodean soil. These competitors include Skyrora, which has begun manufacturing its XL rockets at Cumbernauld, in expectation of a first launch next year from the SaxaVord rocket base in Unst, Shetland.
“The launch of Black Arrow in 1971 was Britain’s only successful placing of a satellite into orbit. So we brought back a piece of it – a faring that connected the first and second stages before it fell to Earth – and have put it at the entrance of our manufacturing hall to make it clear that, after half a century, we are back in business and ready to go into space again,” said Euan Clark, a project team lead at Skyrora.
Other rocket companies with plans for UK launches include Orbex Prime, whose launchers are scheduled to take off from Sutherland Spaceport in north Scotland, with other launch sites being touted for the Western Isles and the Kintyre peninsula as well as locations in Wales and Cornwall.
The rebirth of UK satellite launching – which will be dominated by spaceports located north of Hadrian’s Wall – is the result of the dramatic miniaturisation of modern electronics. Early spacecraft were the size of cars and required massive launchers. Today, satellites are often the size of shoeboxes that need only modest launchers, like the Skyrora XL. It is 22m in height compared with the 110m-high Saturn V rockets that took Apollo astronauts to the moon.
The three-stage Skyrora XL will be powered by 3D printed engines and in the near future should, if the company’s plans work out, be launching around a dozen satellites a year from Unst, the most northerly inhabited place in the British Isles. Here, rockets can be fired over the open waters of the North Sea and will carry probes on polar orbits where Earth-monitoring spacecraft can study sea-level fluctuations and ice-sheet changes as the planet revolves beneath.
“We expect that environment-monitoring probes as well as communication satellites will form the core of our business,” Clark told the Observer. Each rocket will be able carry payloads up to 300kg, at a cost of £30,000 to £36,000 per kilogram, burning 50,000 litres of fuel to take their cargoes to heights of 1,000km.
Engineers at Cumbernauld are constructing engines for the first orbital flight of Skyrora XL, which is planned for next year. The quiet tempo at its manufacturing plant will change dramatically after that.
“In a few years, we hope to launch a rocket every month,” said Clark. “There are seven engines on the Skyrora first stage and another in its second stage, which means we will have to build one of them every three or four days to keep up that schedule.”
These highly complex engines will burn a kerosene-peroxide propellent, which offers key advantages, added Clark. It produces less pollution than standard fuel and can remain stored in a rocket on a launchpad for several days – in contrast to most launchers, which currently use liquid oxygen that has to be drained from the craft when delays occur. Given the unpredictability of weather in Shetland, an ability to keep fully fuelled rockets on a launch pad for long periods will be a key benefit.
Rocket-building promises to bring dramatic changes to the image of Cumbernauld, a town previously renowned for being the setting of Bill Forsyth’s endearing comedy film, Gregory’s Girl – although it remains to be seen how successful the company, which was set up six years ago, will be in achieving its ambitions. It is pinning its hopes on launching small satellites – which are defined as being under 500kg in weight. In 2012, there were about 50 launches of small satellites. By 2019, there were more than 400 and the global market continues to grow, say analysts.
The company – which has been given funds by both the UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency – says it is also eyeing opportunities to use its craft to clean-up near-Earth space.
“There all sorts of old satellites and bits of rocket in orbit round the Earth and these can cause problems,” said Clark. “So if we can use our satellites – as we believe we can – to bring some of them down safely or put them in a safer, higher orbit, that will obviously be very useful as well.”
