WASHINGTON — Orbex, now projecting a 2025 first launch of its small launch vehicle, plans to focus on the small end of the market even as competitors shift to larger rockets.
In an interview during the Farnborough International Airshow in July, Phil Chambers, chief executive of the United Kingdom-based company, said the company was making progress on both its Prime small rocket and launch site at Sutherland Spaceport in northern Scotland.
“We expect the spaceport to be ready in early spring of next year,” he said. Vehicle subsystems are going through critical design reviews, with some flight hardware under construction.
“We are shooting for a 2025 launch,” he said, but declined to be more specific about a launch date other than to say that the company wanted to avoid a launch in winter because of poor weather conditions. “But I do want it to be 2025.”
Matthew Archer, director of launch at the U.K. Space Agency, said in a separate interview at the air show that his agency expected the Sutherland Spaceport to be complete by early next year. The company’s first launch, he projected, is “probably about a year or so away.”
Once the company starts launching the Prime rocket, Chambers said launches would be limited by the company’s ability to produce rockets in its current facilities. “We can probably handmake about three or four a year,” he said. “We need to build a factory to scale up.”
Orbex has plans for a larger factory in Scotland that would allow it to reach what Chambers said is his desired launch rate of 24 per year. However, he said the company projects needing at least 18 months to secure planning approval for the facility.
The company is also looking to raise a new funding round of at least $50 million ] that would support development of that facility. The fundraising environment in Europe is “tough” right now, he said. “There’s not that many deep tech investors in Europe who like late-stage pre-revenue businesses, which all launch companies basically are,” he said, but did see signs of changes given growing defense interest in launch.
Orbex is developing Prime, designed to place up to 180 kilograms into low Earth orbit, at a time when many other companies are abandoning the “microlauncher” market for larger launch vehicles. Chambers said that Orbex still plans to focus on that end of the market.
“Everybody else has moved on and we haven’t,” he said. “That’s a deliberate decision because then we have a niche for certain missions, payloads that were right-sized for that.”
He said Prime is designed for smallsats in constellations with “less-common orbits” than those served by SpaceX’s rideshare missions, like its Transporter series, that provide access to sun-synchronous and mid-inclination orbits. “It generally tends to be orbits that Transporter is not going to and isn’t going to go to where we would come in,” he said.
Demand for such launches, he acknowledged, may not be as high as originally projected as many proposed constellations do not materialize. “But, even if you divide that number by five, it’s still a big number.”
Right now, that market is being served for dedicated launch primarily by Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket. But Chambers said he did not consider that vehicle his biggest competitor. “I think it’s more the other European microlaunchers,” he said, citing German’s Rocket Factory Augsburg, Spain’s PLD Space and France’s Latitude. “I think, obviously, the race is on to see who can deliver capacity, and will all those companies succeed?”
Chambers hinted at a “block 2” version of Prime with increased performance thanks to improved propulsion efficiency. In the longer term, he said the company wants to develop a larger vehicle to better serve the European Launcher Challenge, a competition run by the European Space Agency to support the development of new launch vehicles.