21.10.2024
Skyrora's Skylark L ahead of a suborbital launch attempt from Iceland’s Langanes peninsula in October 2022. Credit: Skyrora
TAMPA, Fla. — Scotland-based Skyrora hopes to launch its first suborbital mission from British soil in the spring following a year of regulatory delays.
It would be the second launch attempt for the company’s 11-meter-long Skylark L single-stage rocket, which fell 700 meters short of the Karman line after lifting off from Iceland in October 2022.
Skyrora pinned the failure on a software issue two months later and is eagerly awaiting another attempt to help de-risk Skyrora XL, a three-stage rocket twice as tall for placing payloads into orbits between 500 and 1,000 kilometers above Earth.
The company applied for a license from the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority in August 2022 to conduct spaceflight activities from Saxavord Spaceport, located in Scotland’s Shetland Islands, initially expecting it to take nine to 18 months to process.
But the CAA advised Skyrora in September 2023 to submit an additional license application for Skylark L, according to Alan Thompson, Skyrora’s head of government affairs.
As the original application dragged on, Skyrora first assumed it would have an easier time getting permission to launch a smaller, less powerful suborbital rocket from the spaceport.
“It’s actually within the parameters of the assessment of environmental effects that Saxavord already submitted,” Thompson told SpaceNews in an interview.
“So we thought, naively, that it would be easier.”
By April, he said Skyrora was not expecting to get the license until September. The company currently expects its application to be processed by mid-December for a suborbital launch in spring 2025.
New regulatory regime
SaxaVord became the first of a wave of vertical spaceports being developed in the United Kingdom to get a CAA license last year, allowing the spaceport to host up to 30 launches annually.
Germany’s Rocket Factory Augsburg had looked set to get a license to perform the first-ever vertical launch to orbit from British soil from the spaceport this year, but those plans went up in flames in a static-fire explosion.
The CAA “has only really got one cookie cutter and it’s for orbital launch,” Thompson said, adding “they can’t deviate from a process that they really are only getting to grips with right now.”
For the suborbital launch from the U.K., Skyrora also needs to complete a navigational risk assessment for the rocket’s projected splashdown off Scotland’s coast.
The U.K.’s Maritime Coastguard Agency oversees this assessment, covering what happens post-splashdown, such as how the rocket potentially breaks up and how the maritime environment would be affected whether the rocket is successfully recovered or not.
“We will need it to launch at the end of the day,” Thompson said, but “it’s like an ancillary license or an additional certification that we require to allow us to do that.”
Notably, he said MMO already has experience handling similar splashdown risk assessments, including one completed last summer for the German Offshore Spaceport Alliance (GOSA).
Orbital launch progress
Skyrora sees revenue potential from suborbital customers seeking to use Skylark L for up to six minutes of microgravity, ranging from academic research institutions to commercial technology developers.
The company’s inaugural U.K. flight also includes a proof of concept mission for a space telemetry provider to show how Skylark L could communicate with satellites.
Still, the company sees a bigger commercial opportunity for Skyrora XL, which would leverage the telemetry and onboard computing systems being engineered for Skylark L.
Thompson said Skyrora XL’s development continues apace despite Skylark L’s delays.
Although there are synergies between the two rockets, Skylark L’s main 30-kilonewton engine has a pressure-fed system while Skyrora XL’s 70-kilonewton engines use a turbopump.
Thompson said the company is close to completing tests for the last two of nine engines on Skyrora XL’s first stage, adding “we’ve got an engine test a week going on at the moment.”
He said Skyrora is also close to manufacturing Skyrora XL’s first stage and is preparing to integrate the engines for a vertical fire test by mid-2025.
Skyrora, which has development roots in the Ukraine, had hoped to perform the first vertical launch to orbit from British soil this year, according to the company’s latest public update Dec. 18.
Quelle: SN
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Update: 16.08.2025
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Skyrora weighs options on the path to the UK’s first vertical launch
Edinburgh-based Skyrora was granted its Spaceflight Operator Licence from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) on August 5 — the first vertical launch license awarded to a British company to launch from the UK.
NSF spoke with Skyrora’s Head of Business, Derek Harris, to discuss the upcoming launch of its Skylark L suborbital vehicle and the progress already being made towards its Skyrora XL orbital launcher.
The launch license was a long time coming and could enable Skyrora’s suborbital Skylark L to become the first UK-built rocket to be launched vertically from British soil. The license authorizes one initial launch, and covers up to 16 flights per year from the SaxaVord spaceport situated 80 km to the northeast of mainland Scotland on the northernmost of the Shetland Islands.
The awarding of the license doesn’t, however, automatically imply that the company’s next launch will take off from SaxaVord, though Harris certainly hopes that it will be. In the roughly three years while the company waited for its launch approval, Skyrora decided to first launch the rocket from Iceland’s mobile Langanes site in 2022. The vehicle had been ready for a couple of years, but unfortunately, the regulations were not, Harris notes.
With no clear answer as to when the license might be awarded, the company considered alternative sites such as Esrange in Sweden and Andøya Spaceport in Norway, eventually settling on Iceland, where its smaller Skylark Micro had previously been tested in August 2020.
A second Skylark L vehicle also stands ready now, and had been completed around six to eight months after the Iceland launch. Despite being awarded the long-awaited UK launch license, the company might yet decide to conduct a second launch of Skylark L from another site while everything at SaxaVord is finalized for a launch.
“SaxaVord is actually full up for this year”, Harris points out, adding that Rocket Factory Augsburg’s (RFA) static fire anomaly last August caused the company to switch to the only other available pad at SaxaVord. Subsequently, there’s no pad currently available for Skylark L to launch from until next year.
“Now we need to make a decision [whether] to hold off and launch out of SaxaVord next year,” he adds, “or is it more important to the milestones in our own program to look at an alternative site – whether that be Oman, Australia, Andøya, or even going back to Iceland again.”
While Iceland’s Langanes site is already known to the company, Australia has a few options, noting it would also introduce some logistics around shipping the vehicle there. Oman’s Etlaq Spaceport is relatively new and conducted its first test flight of the Duqm-1 late last year.
Conversely, Andøya Spaceport has facilitated over 1,200 suborbital launches and was the site for Isar Aerospace’s maiden launch of the Spectrum in March — the first orbital attempt from the spaceport. It’s an interesting situation where the company is theoretically spoilt for choice but also “a little late to the party”, as Harris puts it, “so we have to see what everyone’s availability is.”
Over time, and through necessity, the company has developed a containerized ‘spaceport in a box’ concept, which means that it doesn’t especially need a pad to launch from. “All we need is a bit of flat ground,” Harris states. “We can bring our infrastructure in — basically, all we need to do is lay down a couple of metal plates to keep debris out of the engine. The whole spaceport in a box, as we call it, is about seven containers, and that includes our own range and control room.”
“It’s a very hard decision”, says Harris, “We fought tooth and nail to try and get this license to do it from the UK, so a lot of us want that launch to happen. We were trying to be cheeky earlier in the year and say ‘we just need a space in the field within your perimeter, so it’s still in a regulated spaceport’ but I don’t think they were too keen on that idea!”
While the launch license is now active, with environmental assessments and other paperwork now in place, there are still two or three conditions to fulfil around security, safety, and operations before Skyrora can actually take a vehicle to the pad.
There’s no single reason why the CAA took so long to finally award Skyrora its UK license, which follows the authority’s first-ever vertical launch license being issued to RFA seven months earlier in January. Harris offers a more generous and empathetic view on this than the company might have provided a couple of years ago, when frustrations were felt.
“We need to remember this has never been done in the UK,” Harris points out. “We thought ‘if you let us test, we can then work back from that point’ whereas the government was thinking ‘well, no — we want to make sure everything is as safe as possible before we allow anything near a launchpad.’ So it was two different points of view, and it took a little bit of time for everyone to come to the middle and start talking and collaborating properly.”
Early Skylark Vehicles
Skyrora has taken an iterative approach to reaching space, with each of its three vehicles designed to demonstrate technologies, test components, and inform the next one in line. The company’s first vehicle, the Skylark Nano, launched from the Kildermorie Estate in Ross-shire in August 2018. This 1.3 m tall vehicle reached roughly 6 km in altitude and first tested parachute recovery. Due to the nature of these small-scale tests, the three suborbital launches that were conducted with this early vehicle across roughly 12 months were not, however, subject to the CAA’s licensing regime.
The company’s relationship with the site in the Langanes Peninsula of Iceland then began with the launch of the two-stage Skylark Micro in 2020. At twice the size, measuring 3.3 m tall, the vehicle reached just under 27 km in altitude, and both stages were recovered after landing under parachute. The mission tested critical components such as telemetry and GPS, onboard electronics, and recovery procedures.
Skylark L’s maiden flight
Following the Skylark Micro campaign, Iceland was a natural choice for the company’s next vehicle. “We said ‘we would like to come back with Skylark L, except this one’s bigger – this one is 11 m tall, a meter wide, and is potentially going to go to 126 km’.”, notes Harris.
This was new ground for Langanes, which didn’t have regulations or a framework to cover this type of launch. It led the Skyrora team into a series of conversations with environmental agencies, air traffic control, and other stakeholders. “We drew up the checklist, went through and appeased everyone within that list, and they gave us permission to do the launch that October.”
The vehicle did leave the pad, though it didn’t reach the intended altitude and was aborted early in its flight due to a software anomaly, which took some time to track down. “I think it was a success, and I think most of the team agrees with that”, comments Harris. “We managed to set up a mobile spaceport, [and] we had the vehicle leave the launch site. For me, the success was all the information we got from setting up that spaceport — proving that we could be agile, adaptable, and have a mission done within seven to ten days.”
The cause of the anomaly was found to be digital instructions that had been buffering and not reaching their target. “We were sending commands across to the vehicle — get ready for takeoff, start to open up valves, things like this. We could tell it wasn’t doing it, so when we sent the abort through to stop it, everything went through,” Harris explains.
The abort command caused the series of previous instructions to then reach the vehicle, opening up a valve for fractions of a second — enough for the vehicle to subsequently leave the pad. Needless to say, a lot of testing has been conducted to address this issue and ensure the vehicle’s next flight goes better.
Skylark L stands 11.6 m tall and 0.7 m wide — a little shorter than PLD Space’s Miura 1 and HyImpulse’s suborbital SR-75. Unlike its predecessors, which used solid rocket motors, Skylark L introduced the first of its pressure-fed engines, burning a combination of High-Test Peroxide (HTP) and the company’s own variant of kerosene as propellants.
Rather than using the more typical RP1 grade of kerosene, Skyrora makes its own ‘Ecosene’ using unrecyclable plastic waste. In addition to burning more efficiently, the lower emissions and pollutants also help to reduce its environmental impact.
HTP is readily available in Scotland, where it’s used in other industries, including salmon farming, though at much lower concentrations. “We’ll be using anywhere between 90% and 98% when we’re testing engines, and they may be using 30%,” Harris observes. Like the Scottish whiskies the area is also famed for, Skyrora applies in-house distillation processes to reach the strength needed for launch purposes.
The use of HTP harks back to the UK’s Black Arrow program from over fifty years ago, which also used it. Launching from Woomera in South Australia, Black Arrow was the nation’s only domestic orbital launch vehicle and followed on from the suborbital Black Knight rocket tests and the Skylark sounding rocket.
The latter inspired Skyrora’s vehicles, which are named after it as a tribute to the heritage of early British rocketry. Despite its successful final flight in 1971, placing the Prospero satellite into orbit, Black Arrow was cancelled as the UK abandoned its satellite launch ambitions. In 2019, Skyrora located and returned parts of this rocket’s first stage to the UK, marking its 48th anniversary, and even tracked down retired engineers who had worked on the project to hear their stories and technical insights.
Although it offers a little less performance than when using cryogenics for oxidizers, HTP can be stored at room temperature, making it more suited to Skyrora’s likely launch locations.
“If anyone’s ever been to Scotland, you can get four seasons in one day,” explains Harris. “The wind can affect a launch quite quickly, so being able to have your oxidizer and fuel stay on board for up to several days without issues gives a better option to hit launch windows. It takes a huge amount of due care, but for moving it about mobile spaceports, and even at our test site in Scotland, being able to store it and not have to worry too much about evaporation does simplify a lot of things.”
Skyrora XL
Dropping the Skylark prefix, Skyrora XL will be the company’s first orbital-class launcher and could yet become the first UK-built orbital-class rocket to be launched from UK soil.
While the various Skylark vehicles were each intended to inform the next in an iterative approach, the XL has been partially developed over the last eight years. “Because the vehicles have been delayed by a couple of years, the whole aim was that all the information we got back would affect any changes we would make, but we’ve had to take that on the chin and move forward”, Harris elaborates.
The company released a video in 2020 showing a test of the 3.5 kilonewton third-stage vacuum engine — a reignitable pressure-fed engine with a specific impulse of 305 seconds. Harris recollects the team spending Christmas Eve in a container performing these engine restart tests.
The second stage’s Skyforce engine was then static fired in 2021 at Machrihanish, west of Glasgow, on the Scottish coast. This regeneratively cooled engine incorporates advanced turbopump technology and has a thrust in vacuum of 85 kilonewtons.
Skyrora XL measures 22.7 m in height and 2.2 m wide, and sits in size between two other European vehicles, which are also intended to launch from the SaxaVord site. It stands taller and wider than Orbex’s Prime launcher (19 m tall), while shorter but a little wider than Rocket Factory Augsburg’s RFA One (30 m tall). For a more familiar comparison, the vehicle is almost 20% taller and twice as wide as Rocket Lab’s Electron, similarly using carbon composites, sporting nine engines on its first stage, and offering a similar payload to orbit.
The vehicle can carry 315 kg into Sun-synchronous or polar orbits up to around 500 km altitude, according to Harris. “That will be the main workhorse for us when it comes to the demonstrator”, he notes, adding that the delays to Skylark L have pushed this from the last quarter of 2026 and into early 2027 now
Fairings for the vehicle have been made and are currently undergoing testing, while the nine 3D-printed Skyforce engines for the first stage have almost completed their testing campaign. “We’ve got one or two tests on the last engine,” Harris adds, “and then some destructive and non-destructive testing on the first stage tanks. Then we can move into integration of those and head towards a first-stage static test.”
These engines have a combined thrust at sea-level of 70 kilonewtons and are arranged in a 3×3 grid pattern — a geometric layout which is also utilized on Spectrum’s first stage. “We’ve pushed them to that, and above by quite a bit, so we know what we’re quoting is actually under what they can hit”, adds Harris, “so we know we’ve got room to maneuver.”
A third kick-stage can act as a space tug, delivering small satellites to their destination orbits, from smaller payloads on potential rideshares to constellations. Skyrora has performed vacuum testing in the UK, restarting the engine at least 20 times, according to Harris. Scotland already builds more satellites than any other European country, and, with the likes of Spire, Clyde Space, and Alba Orbital on their doorstep, there are plenty of potential launch contracts to be won that could keep the company busy for many years.
Future designs
The company has come far from the original team of five people in a small office roughly eight years ago. With a headcount of 85 now, plus a handful of contractors, Skyrora aims to rise to around 300 permanent staff once it has moved into commercial launches.
The company has been diversifying from the beginning and, with the UK an unexplored supply chain when it came to building rockets, developed its own SkyPrint 3D printer that can print an area as large as 2 m square.
A second head allows subtraction as well as addition. “We can actually machine and print on the same machine, which saves you [from] taking the part off”, Harris points out. “It’s one of the biggest in Europe, possibly in the world.” Like the container-based approach for the launch infrastructure, the printer was born from necessity, which has made the company stronger and more innovative, he adds.
A Skyforce-2 engine design is in the wings, which the propulsion team has been working on in the background. The turbo pump is already designed, and prototypes are ready for a series of iterations and testing.
Harris predicts it could be three to five years after the vehicle launches before the new designs might take flight. “The problem is, if you start to switch engines on the vehicle, you then need to apply for a new license, and no one really wants to wait for that long. That’s why you need XL to be running while you apply for those new engines on the vehicle.”
For now, Skylark L waits ready in Glasgow, as Skyrora considers its next move.
Quelle: SN