Skyrora plans concierge-level point-to-point service for its small-satellite customers, using a launch-from-virtually-anywhere mobile launch complex on the ground and a three-stage Skyrora XL that can place payloads into precise low Earth orbits. Then, it wants to go above and beyond.
The company designed a third stage spacecraft for Skyrora XL that, when it has finished delivering its primary payloads, like Christmas haggis over the North Pole, for a random example, can run around tidying up the leftovers everyone else has left behind. It's an orbital transfer vehicle (OTV), or a space tug, and it's quite awesome, especially if you hate space junk as much as everyone on Planet Earth should.
"[The space tug] was designed because we're looking at being able to be more of a taxi rather than a bus when dropping off satellites," Harris said. "[It] gives us that opportunity to clean up after ourselves... And it's something that has been key when talking to all of our clients recently."
A first-generation Skyrora space tug will be able to sit in orbit for about a year. As Skyrora tests hardware and the space tug market, there might be one or two loitering up there at a time, waiting to be summoned for extra missions, Harris said. Future space tugs could be called to take down dead satellites or refuel and reposition live ones. A single Skyrora space tug should be able to relight its engines up to 20 times in a vacuum, he said. "If a constellation needed [to be] refueled, it could do a constellation easy enough."
Harris said he's seen concepts from Skyrora engineers that combine two or three different functions on a single space tug, a robotic arm for grabbing satellites and a docking port for refueling, for example. There are "endless possibilities" for the space tug, he said. "This comes from my non-engineering point of view. If you could have that Swiss Army Knife approach, that would be, it would be one of the best things on Earth, or out of Earth, in that regard."
But Harris believes that one of the space tug's most important functions will be to aid in the removal of space junk.
There are already about 34,000 pieces of space junk roughly the size of a softball or bigger in orbit around the Earth. About 3,000 of those pieces are redundant satellites, according to a Skyrora space tug press release. And new constellations are being sent up at a quickening pace, with a percentage of the satellites in those constellations dead from the very beginning. That's not necessarily anyone's fault. It's just what the numbers say, said Harris, who came to Skyrora from the banking sector. Then, as those big pieces of space junk collide, they become debris fields and an exponentially increasing hazard for everyone who wants to do business in low Earth orbit. A future space tug on patrol could take down dead hardware before it becomes a highly destructive chain reaction.
"So, you've got all this debris up there. And, for me, it doesn't make sense. We could get up to a certain orbit and this untrackable little nut or bolt from a 1960s vehicle comes flying through and hits our thing and bang goes the payload, bang goes that, and then doubles or triples the amount of space debris. I think you're gonna see a lot more pushing with this."
In fact, the battle against space junk is just starting to heat up, with Europe and the UK at the front. ESA recently announced plans to launch a "first of its kind" orbital debris monitoring space telescope to track hazards as small as a few millimeters across. ESA also signed a contract with Swiss startup ClearSpace for the "world's first space debris removal mission", using that company's OTV to grab and de-orbit a large chunk of a spent Vega rocket. ClearSpace recently opened an office in the UK. Both ESA space junk missions are planned for 2025.
This year, the UK signed an agreement with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) to help promote space sustainability. In the press release announcing the UNOOSA partnership, UK Science Minister Amanda Solloway said, "As the Earth's orbit becomes congested with potentially hazardous debris, it's critical that we work with our international partners to secure the continued safety and sustainability in space."
With space sustainability increasingly the focus of governments and corporations, Harris believes the market for space tug services could easily rival the market for satellite launches for Skyrora.
"I think the space tug is going to be the market to watch in the next year or two." he said. "And you'll see a lot more expansion and a lot more news coming out. Not only from Skyrora but other companies that are trying to do the same thing."
In the months following Skyrora's founding in 2017, a handful of people, including Harris, gathered to hammer out the pillars of their brand new business, "...why we were going to be able to say, Well, this is us. And one of the main discussions that kept coming up at the time was sustainability; was how we effect the Earth," Harris said
"So, that means, basically everything from the paper that we get, to the cars, how we drive, our travel policies, everything is looked at." And it's all with sustainability in mind and to reduce the carbon footprint in everything that Skyrora does, he said.
And so, rocket fuel, historically dirty as it is, naturally, wound up under the microscope of Skyrora engineers.
In a nod to the only rocket launched from the UK to reach orbit, to date, the legendary BLACK ARROW (officially required to be in all caps, according to Wikipedia and I'm not mad about it), part of a project that was shuttered in 1971, Skyrora plans to use a special mix of kerosene (fuel) and hydrogen peroxide (oxidizer) to propel all rocket stages for Skyrora XL.
"[It] gives us a bit more bang for our buck, given that we only use one part of fuel to six parts oxidizer... And I'm not sure if you've ever seen the take-off of BLACK ARROW. When it goes off, it looks like it's hovering when it comes up," Harris said. "And the way that the thrust comes from the engine means that it doesn't have as much force on the payloads going in, so we can take a little bit more delicate payloads."
But, instead of using the RP-1 kerosene that fuels many rockets these days, which Harris said is hard enough to come by in the UK, Skyrora XL will use Ecosene, an eco-friendly alternative developed by chemical engineers at Skyrora made from unrecyclable waste plastic. According to Skyrora, "[Ecosene] produces 45 percent less greenhouse gas than traditional kerosene."
Technically, it could be made from almost any type of waste plastic, but Ecosene targets plastic that would otherwise end up in a landfill, Harris said. That means those plastic grocery bags (all but banned in California), certain plastic wraps and the squeaky, staticky, ultra-annoying expanded polystyrene packing peanuts that wind up everywhere can instead be reprocessed and used in the engines that propel Skyrora XL rockets into orbit.
"Only about three percent of [expanded polystyrene] worldwide is recycled. Whereas, that gives us one of the biggest amounts back of actual rocket-grade kerosene when we go through the processing," Harris said.
Using waste plastic for eco-friendly fuel opens up some interesting future use-cases for Ecosene beyond rockets. It's why Ecosene was spun off as its own business that Harris now heads.
For example, Ecosene could be used for in-country airline flights for smaller, environmentally conscious nations like Iceland, Harris said. "They want all internal flights to be run off sustainable fuels within the next few years... [Ecosene] could basically be something that could be licensed to the local government and then have four or five sites near the local airports. And then, as I said, you tweak that magic recipe, the magic sauce for it to be for aviation rather than rocket fuel. And then, they're meeting what they have set out, target-wise. They're stopping that landfill [being filled], and it helps everyone." Skyrora recently received the Leif Erickson Award from Iceland for its environmental efforts and, in part, for the development of Ecosene.
The goal is to make the whole Ecosene system mobile, scaling the entire fuel-making process down to the size of a 40-foot container for easy transport by truck or boat. A mobile Ecosene facility could be quickly deployed to disaster zones, like the aftermath of a devastating hurricane like Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017, Harris said. That way, rather than tossing trash plastic into dumpsters, disaster cleanup crews could process the waste on-site, and then, use the resulting Ecosene kerosene to run the generators needed to help move the clean-up along.
Skyrora would find a mobile Ecosene facility exceedingly useful for its own launch operations, as well. Two of Scotland's future vertical-launch spaceports happen to be on remote islands, Shetland Space Centre and the Western Isles' Spaceport 1, where locals may be paying to ship their waste plastic as far as Ireland to be processed. If Skyrora launches from either of those spaceports, an on-site Ecosene facility could use that waste plastic as feedstock for rocket-fuel for Skyrora XL, Harris said. "From a launch point of view, it means what we need is there, and it's helping out a local community."
With its innovative home-grown rocket-makers and multiple spaceports coming online, the UK could very well unlock an up to $10.3 billion domestic microlaunch market, including commercial and institutional customers, over roughly the next decade, according to a 2021 study commissioned by the Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) economic and community development agency for the north and west of Scotland. But the UK won't become a major launch nation without the human capital needed to support the industry.
That's one of the biggest challenges of being a NewSpace company in the UK, Harris said. "So, it's all about kickstarting that supply chain [of people] back, which has really been the biggest problem."
Government isn't the main roadblock, at the moment. The UK government has been very supportive of the space industry, recently, Harris said. "I can't think of any other government that's had to try and embed something that's as big as a space program during a pandemic in my life."
There, also, isn't a lack of talent and enthusiasm among young people when it comes to NewSpace, Harris said. "Was it Thursday?... [checks with colleague]...Last Friday, we had over 200 applicants at that point. And this is for three roles." And applicants are "maxing out their scores."
But hands-on experience matters in rocketry. And for too long in the UK, no one was really tinkering with rockets, leaving the large experience gap seen in the industry here today. After BLACK ARROW was canceled in the 1970s, the rocketry part of the UK space program basically died, Harris explained. Then, it was given Viking funeral rites to make sure it couldn't easily be resurrected?
"[We've] spoken to quite a lot of the engineers and such who were on with [BLACK ARROW] and they were saying, Oh yes. We were told just stick all the paperwork in a skiff. And it got burned sort of thing. So, that heritage, that history, literally went up in flames. So, people that knew how to make turbo pumps, things like this, these are all skills that, sort of, died out. They were no longer taught in universities," Harris said.
Only recently has the education infrastructure started to recover. There is an apprentice at Skyrora right now who, when he finishes the five or six years of work-study for his graduate degree in engineering, will probably be one of the most experienced people with rockets in the UK, Harris said.
That fact has Harris tirelessly touring schools and universities in the UK to drum up extra excitement for the expected flood of coming careers in the UK space industry. He knows the fast-growing space industry will have to compete with other industries for top talent.
A few years ago there were over 80,000 engineering positions unfilled in the UK, Harris said. "If you put onto that a new, upcoming space industry, whether that be building the satellites in Glasgow, the launching with us, building the rockets, there's gonna be so many more jobs coming up. And if we don't help to inspire the next generation, we're not really gonna fill these."
A funny thing happened during Harris' regular rounds at all the schools around town. Yet another new business opportunity popped up out of the blue. As they do these days in Scotland.
There wasn't supposed to be a market for Skylark L. That suborbital rocket was just supposed to be a tester for the much bigger Skyrora XL that aims much higher. Now, there could be up to three payloads onboard even the smaller rocket's maiden flight planned for August this year. To hear Harris tell the story, this suborbital side-business opportunity, whatever you wanna call it, just, sorta, happened. Rather, it was probably bound to happen. Given the setting.
"But, again, this is where Scotland comes in, being a great small big country," Harris said.
In addition to all the satellite makers and big data crunchers and NewSpace crammed into a country the size of South Carolina, a world-class university in need of affordable micro-gravity research for its grad students just happens to be right around the corner from Skyrora HQ. And there are pubs nearby. And a tight-knit community that likes to gather there.
So, sometime before the pandemic shutdowns, a regular school speaking engagement led naturally to the usual shoptalk with students and professors over pints at the University of Edinburgh's student union after hours. Skylark L may have come up between beers.
"My favorite part is just sitting in the pub with them afterwards and just hearing them all and hearing what they're studying," Harris said. "And, we went, Well, we could do this or We could work with this and then just sort of networking, basically, and just sort of filling everyone in." The suborbital market wasn't a part of Skyrora's original business plan, "but it has got the feasibility to have its own legs and run."
So, you sketched out the details of an entirely new business niche for Skyrora in a pub, is what I heard.
"It's a very Scottish thing," Harris said.
Adam created Outerspaceland to tell the stories of dreamers and to live through all of the brilliant people who push the boundaries of everything that's possible. Contact him at outerspacelander@gmail.com or @Ospaceland on Twitter.