PRIME — Britain

Britain, though notorious for being the only government to achieve orbit and then cancel its space program, is not without a substantial aerospace industry, and it’s getting its share of New Space startup companies. One of them is (or was) called Orbex, and their promised rocket is rather interesting in that it burns a fuel that nobody else uses: cryogenic propane. (A few years after they announced this, Isar also selected propane.) And one thing Orbex likes to emphasize is that they source it from people who produce it as a biofuel, so the whole rocket is almost carbon-neutral. Propane doesn’t burn as clean as methane, but it’s pretty close. One advantage of propane is that it can be stored as a liquid at room temperature without having to use a lot of pressure, yet it can also be chilled to the temperature of liquid oxygen without freezing. In the latter state it gains density. Their stages actually put the propane tank inside the lox tank. Maybe the intent is to make sure that if something boils off, it will be the oxygen. The tanks are carbon composite.

The engine is 3D-printed, as is becoming commonplace nowadays. They claimed it was the largest 3D-printed engine in the world, though that record probably won’t last for very long, if it’s even still true now. They’ll use the same engine on the first and second stages, with a large bell on the upper one. The lower stage will have six engines. They have not clarified what power cycle the engine uses, though they have stated that it’s not pressure-fed — it does have a turbopump of some kind. The engines are being developed in Denmark, while the rest of the rocket is made in Scotland.

They also claim that the first stage will be reusable. No details have been given about how it will land or be recovered, or when they plan to try to get that process to work. I do think there’s a bright future ahead for whoever can be the first to regularly land and reuse a small orbital booster, so it’s nice to see a few people saying they’re going to make the effort at it. A couple of others going for it are the Miura from Spain’s PLD Space, and the New Line 1 from China’s LinkSpace. Rocket Labs was also making some effort toward it with the Electron, though the rocket was not originally designed for reuse, and they eventually abandoned the effort. It sure would be nice to see a couple of them succeed, and start making solid fuel rockets obsolete. That could do a lot to reduce the environmental impact of satellite launches, along with the cost.

One place they might launch is from a complex in the Azores, similar to the one in the Canaries that the Spanish companies are planning to use. But they were also working on constructing a small launch complex on the north coast of Scotland, at a place called A’ Mhòine. It looks like that would be used for polar or sun-synchronous orbits only... but the plan got into some trouble because the location is environmentally sensitive. If built, the Scottish site could probably also have been used by any other British or European companies that produce a small launcher, such as Skyrora. But then Orbex backed down and decided to launch from the other new Scottish spaceport, SaxaVord, which had become much more complete and fully developed since they had attracted several launch customers despite being located on a remote island in Shetland — namely Unst, the northernmost inhabited spot in the UK, where the sparse populace used to speak a now-extinct dialect of Norse instead of Scots. This probably means that the coastal spaceport is never going to be finished.

Skyrora has worked on a few different engines and done a few suborbital test launches, as well as developing their own “Ecosene” renewable fuel. Orbex, meanwhile, has only shown the public nonworking prototypes. Before 2022 they only had a second stage to show, but now they have a full stack put together... supposedly. This apparently put them in the lead relative to other European startups such as Isar, but then their CEO Chris Larmour resigned in April 2023 with no named replacement, with statements indicating that the company might be changing strategies. This left many industry watchers wondeing if Orbex had ever been anywhere near ready to put anything into service. Skyrora is now widely being taken more seriously than Orbex is, with terms like “smoke and mirrors” sometimes being heard in discussions of Orbex. But this didn’t stop Orbex from breaking ground on constructing their coastal launch site, which was confusingly called Sutherland despite being about as far north as you can go in Great Britain.

But as it started to look like there might be nothing much left in Orbex’s tanks, the UK government gave them a refill of cash to help them get something off the ground, and establish British launch capability. Which begs the question of why they passed up the chance to cheaply buy out Virgin Orbit after they went bankrupt — their rocket was successfully putting up satellites and didn’t need a launchpad. Once the excessive development costs of that airborne launch system were written off, that would seemingly have been a much better way to gain space access, with real competitive advantages in being able to take off from multiple locations and avoid difficult weather. I really don’t have much confidence that either Orbex or Skyrora is ever going to become more successful than Virgin Orbit was in their day, and it looks like Germany’s RFA might end up being the main outfit launching satellites from Scotland. Then in 2025 the European Space Agency sent out some seed money to promising European rocket developers, including RFA and Isar and PLD and the Ariane spinoff MaiaSpace, and they picked Orbex as also worth an investment. Maybe — there are a couple more steps to go before any of these outfits actually gets the cash.

It didn’t seem to help. By early 2026 the new cash supply was gone, and Orbex was looking for some other company to buy them out. There were no takers, and they started the process of receivership, i.e. bankruptcy. Some made the argument that this is the UK government’s fault, as they had awarded funds to Orbex that went unpaid, but they answer that these were matching funds which Orbex failed to come up with matches for.

In the end, I don’t know if the company got screwed by a government with a long history of blowing opportunities for advancement, or if they were hapless bozos that the UK is well rid of. Both seem plausible, with how little Orbex allowed the public to see how they were progressing. Either way, now that Virgin Orbit and Reaction Engines Ltd are also gone, that leaves only one venture still active which might give Britain a launch capability on their own soil: , which I think I could fairly describe as the least ambitious of the group. And now Skyrora, which has not received much of any governmental support, is considering buying Orbex’s assets, which they say includes one nearly complete rocket stack, as well as their production facilities and the Unst land parcel.

Prime: mass 18 t, diam 1.3 m, thrust unknown, imp unknown, type unknown (propane), payload 0.15t (0.8% — unknown if reusable mode), cost unknown.