Derek Harris: ‘Space is only hard if you don't have experience’

When you think of space flight, what do you imagine?

Maybe it’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, classic American heroes whose mission to the Moon in 1969 redefined what humans could achieve? Or maybe it’s Elon Musk and his unending ambition to reach Mars, intent on populating the red planet through his rocket company SpaceX?

But very few people will have thought of Scotland.  

That’s something that Derek Harris, business operations manager at Skyrora, is trying to change. 

"We are on a bit of a knife edge at the moment with space in Scotland," says Harris. "If you can unlock launch capabilities in Scotland, you unlock all the rest of the innovations that can then come through that."

Skyrora is a Scottish-based rocket designer and manufacturer founded in 2017 by Volodymyr Levykin, a Ukrainian tech entrepreneur. Since then, the company has grown to over 100 employees and operates a large rocket manufacturing facility in Cumbernauld.  

In the eight years since its founding Skyrora has developed and launched three rockets, with a fourth in the works. The company has also developed a range of new technologies, from advanced 3D printers to a revolutionary rocket fuel developed from unrecyclable plastic waste.

“I hate this line that space isn't easy, space is hard,” says Harris. “It's the most overused phrase in the industry. Space is only hard if you don't have experience.”

To gain this experience, Skyrora pulls from a deep pool of UK and Ukrainian space knowledge. Figures show that one fifth of all UK space sector jobs are in Scotland and that Glasgow produces more small satellites than anywhere else in Europe.  

“Our founder Volodymyr had an ace up his sleeve because he was from Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine and had a lot of ties to Dnipro, which was the Rocket City,” says Harris. “He knew he could tie in the best of British and Scottish innovation with the history and the experience of the Ukrainians.”

This mixture of experience and innovation has allowed Skyrora to experiment and innovate faster than expected, says Harris. One example of this is its engine testing site, which is based in Midlothian and was built in less than eight months. The site occupies an area of over 120,000 square feet and allows for rocket engines to be tested on UK soil for the first time since the 1970s, when the UK Government effectively shuttered its rocket development programme. That made the UK the first and only country in the world to develop a successful system to launch satellites into space and then abandon it.  

Earlier this year, Skyrora was granted a launch licence which allows it to launch its latest suborbital rocket, the Skylark L, from a UK site. Despite this, a launch is yet to take place.

“There's a lack of launch sites,” says Harris. “Obviously we have SaxaVord in the north, but at the moment their launch pads are all locked out. Otherwise, we would have had a launch there with our launch license this year from Scotland. Now that's been put in jeopardy and it looks like we might have to go overseas to do that launch, which isn't ideal because that then isn't really a sovereign launch.”

SaxaVord is one of seven spaceports in the UK but the only one which has a licence to perform space launches. The site, located in Unst on Shetland, is the first fully licensed vertical launch spaceport in Europe and is designed for small rockets delivering payloads into low earth orbit.  

Unst was picked as a spaceport location due to the availability of clear northbound flight trajectories that avoid densely populated areas. The facility is privately owned and has three launch pads and equipment to track and control rockets on site. Private companies from around the world can bid to lock down these three launch pads for their own exclusive use.  

“I am very surprised that there isn’t national infrastructure to start with – it’s not like you have commercial companies running nuclear power plants,” says Harris. “I would have expected if the UK was going to have a spaceport, it would be on national infrastructure from day one. Because then it really does come to the point that even if the UK does have its own sovereign launch capability, if it's locked out by a foreign company, you can't launch it.”

The ability to launch rockets carrying satellites from a sovereign launch point is something that could become a crucial factor in the UK’s future security, says Harris. Just last month Major General Paul Tedman, the head of UK Space Command, said that UK military satellites were being targeted by Russian interference on a weekly basis. The UK spends around one per cent of its defence budget on space, even though Tedman says that around £450bn of the UK economy is dependent on space.

“When things like a bank system go down for a couple of hours, everyone still thinks it's a new level of apocalypse,” says Harris. “Well, some of these systems use satellites and if one of those were to go down, how quickly can we get one up? It might not sound like a defence purpose, but it is because it's protecting the country and it's protecting the infrastructure that we have.”