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.
A Skylark L vehicle is assembled in Skyrora’s facility. (Credit: Skyrora)
“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.”
Skylark L and its containerized mobile spaceport. (Credit: Skyrora)
“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.”
Earlier Skylark vehicles, such as Skylark Nano (pictured), were powered by solid rocket motors. (Credit: Skyrora)
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.”
Skylark L performing a static fire on the mobile pad at the Kildermorie Estate in 2020. (Credit: Skyrora)
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.
Skyrora conducts 70 kilonewton engine qualification tests. (Credit: Skyrora)
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.
Original Black Arrow engineer Terry Brook speaks in front of the recovered first stage from the R3 vehicle, which launched Prospero. (Credit: Skyrora)
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.”
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