Launch failure

So, there’s this:

A British space company hoping to launch the first homegrown rocket from Scotland is on the brink of collapse, threatening 150 jobs and throwing doubt over the UK’s extraterrestrial ambitions.

Orbex, which is based in the Scottish Highlands, is lining up administrators as hopes fade that it will strike a rescue deal or raise funds, despite having been handed £26m in government loans last year.

The startup had planned to launch a rocket from a base on the Shetland Islands and was “on the cusp” of holding its first test flights in 2026, according to its chief executive, Phil Chambers.

The company had also been in talks to raise fresh cash from the Treasury-backed National Wealth Fund, but that deal fell through at an “early stage” of discussions late last year, a source with knowledge of the situation said.

That’s a lot of money. One has to wonder, though, what’s the purpose of the exercise? These are private companies given state funding of one sort or another. The UK is a founder member of the European Space Agency, which is not a part of or subsidiary entity of the European Union. According to some sources the UK will have given £1.84bn to ESA across the period 2022-27. Perhaps £26m isn’t quite as large a sum as all that in that context.

The Financial Times suggests that the UK may pull Orbex’s chestnuts out of the fire and have some stake in the Orbex SaxaVord ‘spaceport’ on the island oof Unst, a launch base which would allow ‘Britain to remain, as a ‘middle sized space power with a limited budget’. The FT sees this as not a bad option as long as the UK retains a range of alternative launch options including its links to ESA and the US.

In a way, it’s a sign of the times. States piggy-backing onto commercial launch operators (or non-operators as in this case) to mixed effect. But it’s also a reality that Britain is not particularly well placed, given the financial turbulence it has experienced since Brexit, but also due to its size. Large-scale space programmes are beyond its ability to mount. That’s something for the superpowers and the quasi superpowers and some of them – as we see with the US – are tilting strongly towards commercial carriers (though the security and other implications of that are troubling).

In some ways the thought arises that there’s no great need for a British ‘sovereign launch’ system given those other options, and this is well appreciated in government and other circles.