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Orbex, the UK rocket start-up racing to be one of the first to launch a satellite from British soil, has strengthened its management team ahead of future fundraisings by naming a former space agency boss and a tech entrepreneur as its new executive chair and chief executive.
Phillip Chambers, co-founder of employee engagement platform Peakon, will become Orbex chief executive, while the former director-general of the Spanish Space Agency, Miguel Belló Mora, has been named as executive chair of the nine year old space start-up.
Chambers, who sold Peakon to Workday for $700mn in 2021, said his job would be to take Orbex “from start up to scale up. A lot of my experience has been doing that”.
Orbex, founded in 2015, has grown rapidly in recent years, and needed to move to the next phase of development, according to Martin Coates, a former director who stepped in to become interim chief executive after the abrupt departure of the company’s co-founder and former chief executive Chris Larmour in April. “We can’t keep in a start-up mentality,” Coates told the FT in a recent interview. “Now we need to really mature as an organisation.”
Orbex is one of dozens of companies in Europe aiming to tap into growing demand for launch services to low earth orbit (LEO), the region up to 2000 kms above the earth. SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket has driven down the costs of launching into space, opening up new commercial markets in LEO for activities such as earth observation and broadband communication.
Orbex is developing the Prime micro-launcher, a 19 metre long, two stage rocket designed to carry small satellites of up to 180kg. The rocket is one of the smallest under development in Europe and will be flown from the spaceport the company is building in northern Scotland, one of several sites supported by the UK space agency to create sovereign launch capability.
However, Orbex is already discussing the possibility of developing a larger rocket to meet demand, even before it makes its first flight with Prime, according to both Chambers and Coates. This would require substantial extra funding, according to analysts.
“For sure those thoughts are happening,” Coates said. “Prime is the start. It is the beginning of the journey for this organisation.”
“Logically it makes sense if you want to drive prices down, all this can only really happen with a larger rocket,” Chambers told the FT. “The question is how will it be supported financially.”
Chambers, who invested in Orbex when it raised £40mn in a third fundraising in late 2022, said he had been brought onboard in part because of his experience raising funds for growing companies. “Fundraising is something I have been quite successful in,” he said. Orbex has already raised £86.5mn after three fundraisings, including support from the UK and Danish governments, and the European Space Agency. The company would eventually “need to raise more money . . . from primarily European investors,” Chambers said.
Coates said the group could seek new funding sometime next year, as it scaled up facilities to deliver its goal of one launch a month. However, he stressed this could be through a variety of channels, including debt or asset-backed finance as well as an equity round. In September, the start-up reported an annual loss to the end of December 2022 of £5.2mn.
Orbex has still not announced a date for its first launch. But the group has already confirmed six commercial satellite launch contracts.
The company, headquartered in Scotland, with design and testing facilities in Denmark, has encountered a series of setbacks in its journey towards its first flight. It was forced to take over the management of the spaceport in Sutherland, northern Scotland, after Lockheed Martin abandoned the project in favour of another launch site — SaxaVord, in the Shetlands, off the north coast of Scotland. In December the UK Civil Aviation Authority granted SaxaVord a spaceport licence.
Efforts to develop the Sutherland space port were also held up by environmental protests and Covid.
This story has been amended to say SaxaVord is based in the Shetlands, not the Hebrides as initially stated.
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