British Launch Company Skyrora Completes Testing On Rocket Upper Stage – And Hopes To Reach Space This Year

Scotland-based startup Skyrora says it has fully tested the upper stage of its Skyrora XL rocket, which it hopes to launch as soon as 2022 – but may launch another smaller rocket in the next six months.

The company, headquartered in Edinburgh, says that on December 23, 2020, it successfully test fired the upper stage of its XL rocket for 450 seconds at its test site in Fife.

The test – which involved three firings of the engine – was a full flight-ready test to simulate an actual launch, including full operation of its software and avionics.

With the test, the company said the upper stage – which will sit at the top of the 22-meter-high Skyrora XL rocket – was now essentially qualified for spaceflight.

“This is a complete flight weight third stage for Skyrora XL,” says Robin Hague, Skyrora’s Head of Launch.

Skyrora says the stage can operate as a standalone spacecraft itself, known as the Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV), which would allow it to deploy satellites and perform other activities in orbit.

Hague said it was similar to the Photon kick stage employed by New Zealand’s Rocket Lab on its Electron rocket, but was “more capable because it is a full third stage.”

The OTV is made of carbon fibre and uses a 3D-printed 3.5 kilo-Newton liquid engine, with spherical tanks storing the fuel, which is kerosene and a hydrogen peroxide oxidizer.

After launch it would be deployed in orbit, where it could then release satellites weighing up to 315 kilograms that it carried on board.

The ability of the OTV to fly itself would allow multiple missions to be carried out, such as acting as a “space tug” to remove dead satellites from orbit following the launch of a new satellite.

“After the primary mission is complete, it can also execute secondary objectives,” says Volodymyr Levykin, Skyrora’s CEO.

“We can leave it in orbit as a standalone spacecraft, which can reignite its engine up to 15 times.”

Levykin singled out satellite mega constellations like the U.K.’s OneWeb as an example, a rival to Starlink from Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, saying Skyrora could replace satellites in the constellation using the OTV.

“We believe we could launch [their] new satellites and then, as an extra mission, deorbit the old one,” says Levykin. “That is how I see the future.”

Before such missions can be contemplated, Skyrora will first need to prove it is able to reach space with its rockets.

The company has performed several low-altitude test flights, most recently launching the 3.3-meter-long Skylark Micro rocket to an altitude of almost 27 kilometers from Iceland in August 2020.

Now the company is preparing to launch its larger Skylark L vehicle in the first half of 2021, which measures about 12 meters in length and was tested last year.

This will be capable of just reaching the boundary of space, 100 kilometers above our planet’s surface, before returning to Earth.

“That would be a huge milestone for us,” says Levykin. The location of the launch site for the test has not yet been announced.

The overriding goal, however, is to reach orbit with the Skyrora XL vehicle, with a first launch currently targeted for either the end of 2022 or early 2023.

Over the next two years the company plans to test the second and first stages of the rocket, ahead of its inaugural launch, including static fire tests of the engines.

What is not clear at the moment is where this launch will be conducted from, with several options on the table.

Skyrora uses a unique mobile launching platform, which it says enables it to be flexible with its launch site selection, but it will depend on which site is available first.

In the U.K. two launch sites are being developed, one backed by the U.K. government in Sutherland, on the northern tip of mainland Scotland.

The other, the Shetland Space Centre located on the Shetland Island of Unst, recently received backing from the U.S. aerospace giant Lockheed Martin.

“We are flexible and we can launch from anywhere,” says Levykin.

“I have a bit of a preference for Shetland because it has a better geographical position for trajectory optimizations, but we’ll see.

“We’re happy to launch with whoever is first.”

Skyrora is not the only U.K. company currently developing rockets to reach orbit, with two others also aiming to achieve the feat.

Orbex, based near Inverness in Scotland, hopes to reach orbit with its Prime rocket in the coming years, with half a dozen launches a year planned from Sutherland.

The Richard Branson-backed Virgin Orbit, too, hopes to conduct horizontal launches from the U.K. in the future with its Cosmic Girl plane, which would launch rockets to space from high altitude.

While the U.K. has reached space before with its Black Arrow rocket in 1971, launched from Australia, and later military launches, no commercial U.K. company has ever launched to orbit.

Skyrora’s latest test has brought it a step closer to that goal, and if all goes to plan, we could see orbital launches beginning by the end of next year.

“It’s fantastic that companies such as Skyrora are persisting in their ambition to make the U.K. a ‘launch state’,” British astronaut Tim Peake, and a member of Skyrora’s advisory board, said in a statement.

“In undertaking a full fire test of their third stage, Skyrora is one step closer to launch readiness.”