SaxaVord ‘a real spaceport now’ after first rocket explosion

Nothing could look more ominous for the European space industry than the tower of flame lighting up the skies over Shetland’s SaxaVord spaceport when a prototype engine suddenly and spectacularly caught fire on the launchpad last week.
The blaze was certainly “a nightmare” for the engineers of Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA), the German company that hoped to conduct its first vertical rocket launch this year.
“It hurts so darn bad,” said Stefan Brieschenk, RFA’s co-founder and chief operating officer. “All the blood, sweat and tears we put into this — lost. I was unable to sleep for the last days and was overcome with dizziness every time I tried to close my eyes. My friends and my family are invested into this and I cannot fail them.”
Yet for the British pioneers who developed and own the remote spaceport on Unst, the UK’s most northerly inhabited island, Monday night’s events offer proof that in practice their rigorous safety systems work faultlessly, with no one hurt or even at risk of injury.
“We heard the initial ignition of the engines and then immediately you could see there’s something wrong,” said an industry insider who witnessed the inferno.
“But it was then just the case of sitting back. They have done lots of exercises with the emergency services and there are working groups up on Shetland analysing this sort of thing. It was just business as usual: the fire engines came and there was a discussion, but the plan was always to let it burn, because there’s no human risk.”
High above the most northerly of Unst’s windy cliffs, final checks on the 12m-tall concrete “launch stool” have yet to be completed after the blaze, but the operators are confident that SaxaVord will be ready for the next trials, whenever they are required.
Most in the burgeoning UK space industry share the same determination and cautious optimism as SaxaVord’s owners.
“Risk and reward are two things that are very closely aligned in this business,” said Craig Clark, the co-chair of Space Scotland.
“With satellites, there’s a lot of testing in environmental chambers to simulate the space environment and to simulate launch [conditions]. But there’s no way to accurately simulate a thruster going at full thrust, so you need to actually do it. If something’s not quite right, it’ll blow up. That’s just what happens. Hopefully it works next time,” Clark said.
RFA had already successfully completed two “hot-fire” tests — required for engines manufactured with new processes and components — at SaxaVord this year, before the third, on Monday, went up in smoke.
The first analysis of an “engine anomaly” was completed by the end of the week. A blog post by Brieschenk suggests the cause was an oxygen-fire in a turbopump, the mechanism in a rocket engine which receives liquid propellants from vehicle tanks at relatively low pressure and supplies the same to its combustion chamber.
“That engine and that turbopump have run before without issues,” he said. “Eight engines ignited. We had multiple back-up and safety systems in place that were supposed to shut everything down — but things did not align on Monday as planned.”
Space is big business for the UK and for Scotland in particular. Last month, a National Audit Office report found a huge increase in UK Space Agency (UKSA) spending over the past five years from £373 million to £647 million, and calculated an estimated £17.5 billion total UK space industry income.
Research by Space Scotland showed that 8,000 people were working in the sector north of the border in 2017, creating a return of £254 million, with analysts predicting a five-fold increase in the workforce by 2030 and, by then, an annual contribution to the Scottish economy in excess of £4 billion.
By 2021, almost one fifth of all UK space sector jobs were in Scotland — split between about 200 companies — and proportionally the country employed over twice as many people in space as the rest of the UK.
The capability for rocket launches is a huge part of Scotland’s appeal to investors, with five sites seeking to develop operations. Machrihanish near Campbeltown on the Mull of Kintyre, and Prestwick, the Scottish government-owned airport south of Glasgow, are targeting horizontal launches, deploying satellites from specially adapted aircraft.
Shetland, along with Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides, and Melness on the mainland, 90 miles from Inverness, are the three northerly sites where vertical take off is planned.
For a synchronous orbit — where satellites travel over the polar regions, maintaining the same position relative to the sun, “Scotland is amazing from launch perspective,” said Dr Matjaz Vidmar, the technical director of the University of Edinburgh’s Space Innovation Hub, and offers multiple advantages.
“If you launch them correctly”, from northern Scotland, said Vidmar, satellites always absorb sunlight, offering the potential for ample solar power, for as long as it takes for a solar panel to degrade. Panels degrade about eight times more quickly in space, but solar cells can retain 88 percent of their original performance after 15 years.
Then there is “the lovely 24-hour spin” of the Earth, which provides “the lateral motion that you require, to transfer data or take images of different parts of the world. From that point of view, places that open up that northern trajectory are really high in demand,” Vidmar said.
Finally, as anyone can attest who has visited Unst, and taken in the wild, empty seas, there is just clear water all the way north, eventually to the pole. That’s a key benefit too, said Vidmar .
“If things do go wrong, as they eventually will, and things crash or at least just release the spent rocket, you have no people, no danger to life. It’s so much easier to manage than if you’re trying to launch anywhere else in Western Europe, apart from northern Scandinavia and [equivalent] places in Alaska and northern Canada. That’s where launches are taking place these days.”
These attributes are attracting an astonishing level of international interest, said Kevin Scullion, a space specialist with Scottish Enterprise, the national business agency.
He cited interest from Malaysia, where government and business increasingly view Scotland as a launchpad for its own space industries, helped by about 30 Scottish companies providing satellite-derived data and insights across many sectors.
These “Earth observations” can help monitor deforestation, soil moisture, agriculture, flooding and flood risk, Scullion said. Location data is another boon, particularly where shipping is concerned.
“They [Malaysian authorities] have got challenges over piracy and illegal fishing. They need to be able to monitor where ships are. Companies in Scotland can do that.”
Scotland also offers other opportunities to southeast Asian tech businesses. “Malaysian companies manufacture satellites themselves, but they don’t have launch sites available in their region. They are asking ‘Could we launch from Scotland?’” Scullion said.
Others have already decided. SaxaVord has struck launch agreements with Lockheed Martin, the US aerospace giant and the German company HyImpulse as well as the UK’s Skyrora. Another four deals with international satellite companies are said to be in the offing.
Interest on this global scale enables the Scottish space pioneers to shrug off Monday’s blaze and the bad publicity it entailed. For anyone thinking the fire was bad news, emails from colleagues in the US told an altogether different story.
“You’re a real spaceport now,” read one message to a Shetland engineer. “You can’t call yourself a spaceport until you’ve had a rocket blow up!”