 The first stage of the RFA ONE rocket burning in a static fire test gone wrong in August at the SaxaVord spaceport. (credit: RFA) |
By Jeff Foust
Monday, September 16, 2024
Tucked into one corner of one of the vast exhibition halls at the Farnborough International Airshow in July was the “Space Zone,” a collection of stands from space companies including Lockheed Martin, which showcased its role in UK space with exhibits including a scale model of an ABL Space Systems RS1 rocket featuring the Lockheed Martin and UK Space Agency logos.
| “If anyone in this industry tells you when there will be a release,” Hammond said, “they’re lying to you because there are so many obstacles.” |
The model was a representation of a planned launch of a “UK Pathfinder” mission by Lockheed for the agency using the RS1. At Farnborough six years earlier, the UK government had announced a contract with Lockheed to conduct a launch from a spaceport in the country as part of the government’s initiative to foster a domestic launch capability. Lockheed subsequently selected ABL, a launch start-up that Lockheed had awarded contracts to and invested in, to carry out the mission, which after many delays was projected for 2025.
The timing of the display was unfortunate, however. On the first day of the airshow, ABL announced that its second RS1 rocket had suffered “irrecoverable damage” in a fire on its launch pad in Alaska during testing ahead of a launch there.
A month later, ABL said in a statement that fuel leaking from the engines fueled a fire that broke out beneath the vehicle during an aborted static fire test. The Pacific Space Complex-Alaska pad on Kodiak Island did not have its own water supply, and water tanks there ran low without extinguishing the blaze. The flames, now out of control, destroyed the rocket.
The incident was the latest setback in the UK's effort to become a launch state. Since launching the initiative in Farnborough in 2018, which included funding for both Lockheed Martin and startup Orbex and the selection of a site in northern Scotland for a spaceport (see “British launch plans finally take off”The Space Review, July 23, 2018), the effort suffered problems ranging from vehicle development delays to launch and commercial failures.
By 2024, the planned launch of the UK’s Pathfinder was no longer expected to be a pathfinder. It would not be the first attempt at an orbital launch from the country: in January 2023, Virgin Orbit conducted a mission of its LauncherOne air-launch system from Spaceport Cornwall in south-west England. However, that launch failed to reach orbit and three months later Virgin Orbit declared bankruptcy and was liquidated shortly after.
Nor was it expected to be the first vertical launch from the UK. At Farnborough, the focus was on German company Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA), whose RFA ONE rocket was undergoing final testing at the SaxaVord spaceport on the Shetland Islands.
“Everything is now being prepared for the next steps in our journey to space,” Scott Hammond, deputy chief executive and chief operating officer of SaxaVord Spaceport, said during a presentation at Farnborough. RFA had already conducted some static fire tests of the rocket’s first stage at the spaceport and, it said, would soon resume them, this time with all nine engines on the stage.
If all goes well, he suggested, RFA ONE's inaugural launch could take place as early as September, though he offered some caution. “If anyone in this industry tells you when a launch will be,” he said, “they're lying to you because there are so many hurdles.”
Weeks later, the spaceport and RFA encountered a major obstacle. On August 19, during a static fire test on the pad, a fire broke out on the pad when one of the nine Helix engines appeared to explode. The entire pad was quickly destroyed.
In a statement released several days later, Stefan Brieschenk, RFA’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said that a fire likely occurred in an oxygen pump in one of the engines — a “very unusual” failure mode that had not been seen in previous engine tests and that the vehicle and pad systems were not designed to contain. “It appears that everything that followed was simply not prepared for this massive damage caused by this oxygen fire in the turbopump,” he concluded.
“We wanted to launch in the coming weeks and months,” he said, but that schedule is on hold indefinitely while the failure is investigated and a new first stage is built. He added that the launch pad infrastructure was largely undamaged.
Orbex has not yet reached the launch pad, nor has it completed it. The company is moving ahead at the Sutherland spaceport, the site in northern Scotland chosen by the U.K. government in 2018. “We expect the spaceport to be ready by early spring next year,” said Phil Chambers, chief executive of Orbex, in Farnborough.
| “The key to that first mission was always going to be the exercise, the stress testing, our ability to get licensed, and Virgin Orbit definitely did a lot of stress testing of that process,” Archer said. |
The company hadn’t offered many public updates on its progress on its small Prime launch vehicle in recent months, but it had gone through a number of executive changes since last year. Chambers, who took over as CEO earlier this year, said he expected the company to be ready for a first launch attempt sometime next year, but didn’t give a more specific date beyond a desire to avoid poor winter weather conditions there. “But I want it to be 2025,” he added.
He said the company is planning to raise another round of funding for a factory that will allow it to ramp up production of Prime. “We can probably handcraft about three or four a year” at its current facility, he said; a new one would allow production to increase to 24 a year.
It’s unclear whether there is demand for 24 launches a year of Prime, a vehicle capable of placing up to 180 kilograms into orbit. Rocket Lab’s Electron, in a similar performance category, has made 10 launches so far this year (an 11th is scheduled for this week), and the company has said customer issues have prevented it from doing more.
 A model of ABL's RS1 rocket, in the UK's Pathfinder launch livery, on display at the Farnborough International Airshow in July. (credit: J. Foust) |
Several factors have played a role in the UK’s struggle to develop a launch industry. “COVID-19 has been a challenge for everyone,” said Matthew Archer, director of launch at the UK Space Agency, in an interview in Farnborough. “Most of our companies have lost between 18 months and two years of their overall production schedule, largely because of COVID-19.”
Companies have also struggled to raise money, which he said is linked to a broader contraction in investment in the space industry in recent years as interest rates rose; at the same time, space insurers suffered significant losses that made it difficult for companies to obtain coverage.
However, there have been advances in other areas, such as launch regulations that Virgin Orbit successfully navigated to gain approval for launch. “The key to that first mission was always going to be practice, stress testing, our ability to get licensed, and Virgin Orbit definitely did a lot of stress testing of that process,” Archer said.
In the UK, commercial launches are regulated by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). “The Virgin Orbit mission didn’t do what was expected, but for us it ensured that the whole system works from start to finish,” said Colin Macleod, head of UK space regulation at the CAA. He added that four companies have “plausible ambitions” to launch from the UK in the next 18 months.
Archer said that in retrospect, he might have taken a different approach to supporting the launch from the U.K. “We deliberately chose a variety of spaceports and providers on the basis that we knew not all of them would be successful,” he said. “I probably would have focused more on specific spaceports” like SaxaVord and Sutherland. “We could have done more to de-risk some of those programs.”
| “I sometimes worry that politicians want to see success right away and if they don’t, they lose interest,” Hammond said. |
It is unclear how much additional support the U.K. government might provide for the launch. The airshow took place just weeks after the Labour Party won parliamentary elections. While industry officials were pleased that Peter Kyle, the new minister whose portfolio includes space, made his first speech since taking office at Farnborough, the government has offered few details on how it might address space issues.
SaxaVord’s Hammond said he was generally concerned that launch failures could lead to a loss of support. “This is a test flight and it’s an iterative process — we learn as we go,” he said, setting expectations for RFA ONE’s long-awaited first flight. “I sometimes worry that politicians want to see success right away and if not, they’ll lose interest.”
RFA plans to return to SaxaVord and make another launch attempt, sometime next year. The future is less certain for ABL and the U.K. launch of Pathfinder: In late August, ABL announced it would lay off an unspecified number of employees as part of cost-cutting efforts. The company had already been working to trim costs without layoffs, CEO Harry O'Hanley wrote in an email to employees. “Thanks to these efforts, we were able to stay on a good planning path, but the recent static fire issue threw us off track.”
That announcement, however, gave few details about RS1’s timeline. The reorganization and layoffs would “reset the cost structure of the business to be sustainable in any environment,” he wrote, including one that has become far less hospitable than companies and agencies on both sides of the Atlantic expected six years ago.
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