Supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering, Ingenious Award

Ingenious is an awards scheme for projects that engage the public with engineering while at the same time providing engineers with skills and opportunities in public engagement.

It is 1998 and the world is on the brink of a disaster that could wipe out all human life. An asteroid the size of Texas is heading straight for earth and scientists have just 18 days to stop the collision. NASA calculates that the only way to prevent this catastrophe is to drill into the asteroid’s surface and detonate a nuclear bomb.

The only person capable of landing on the asteroid and making this vertical excavation is a deep sea oil driller by the name of Harry Stamper. But this is not a one man job, it is going to be a team effort, and Harry won’t accept the mission without his trusted crew. He needs his team because this mission will be the most difficult drilling project he has ever undertaken. Just landing on the asteroid is fraught with danger from fuel fires to asteroid showers. And when Harry’s shuttle, the Freedom, finally lands on the asteroid…….. it misses the target area. But despite all of this Harry finally manages to puncture the iron ferrite surface and sink the bomb deep into the rock. He saves the world.

By now you might have realised that this didn’t happen in real life….it is in fact the plot line of the US box office smash Armageddon and in this episode we speak to an engineer whose love for space was inspired by this film. Joe Laynton, of Scottish Rocket firm Skyrora now spends his time working to bring satellite launch capability back to the UK 50 years of relying on other countries to launch satellites into space.

Abandoned Satellite Launch Capacity

Back in October 1971 the UK conducted its first and only successful orbital launch, firing the Prospero satellite into low earth orbit (LEO) on a Black Arrow rocket but this was the beginning and the end of a native launch vehicle, making it the only nation in the world to develop, and then abandon satellite launch capability.

Fifty years on from Black Arrow, harnessing the resources of space has become a strategic and commercial imperative, with satellite applications now essential to nearly all sectors of the economy (learn more about this in episode 51: Saving Structures with Satellites)

The aerospace sector has already responded, and the UK has burgeoned into one of the world’s leading manufacturers of satellite technology. But this critical launch gap could cripple our needs and imperil forward growth, as the industry has to barter for openings in increasingly crowded foreign launch schedules.

Today the UK has several companies working to fix this. One of them, Skyrora, has an aggressive programme, aiming for the inaugural launch of its flagship low Earth orbital Skyrora XL rocket by 2023.

Skyrora is a UK start-up that designs, manufactures and deploys rockets to clear the way for small satellite manufacturers looking to access space. Headquartered in Edinburgh, and with facilities across Europe, Skyrora is developing launch vehicle technology to ensure that, in their words…“the life-changing benefits of space are realised here on earth”

Joe Laynton, a mechanical engineer for Skyrora, is one of the steely-eyed missile men making this happen and his love of space was inspired by the sci fi film, Armageddon. “It is basically the best move I ever watched. The most ragtag group of people you could ever choose got picked to go into space on a drilling mission. It was based on an asteroid coming towards Earth. And they had to go there, drill it, split it up and blow it up before to save the planet Earth,” he says.

Firing up Rockets

Back on Earth and in the present day, Joe may not be saving the worlds, but he is trying to improve life for its 7.8 billion inhabitants. He works in the technical team at Skyrora, which is based in Edinburgh. “I mainly work on modifications and logistics, which is quite a bit of a dual role, which is quite interesting because it’s not just modification sign and office churning out paperwork,” he says.

The modification work to finesse Skyrora’s rocket technology is carried out at a new rocket engine test site. “In terms of modifications, I mainly work on 30 kilonewton test site. I do pneumatics and hydraulics on feed lines, reroute in the existing routes and installing different valves and systems into it,” he says.

And this leads to Joe’s favourite part of the job, firing the rocket engine. “it is just amazing to hear it will go off the road in the background, although you never get to see in apart from other computer screens, but just hearing that background noise is pretty amazing.”

There are a number of tests that are needed, before the rockets can be deemed launch-ready including pressure testing, engine testing, and static fire testing. All this work will eventually see the engines shoot Skyrora’s rockets up to orbit.

“So Skyrora’s main aim is to provide an orbital rocket service launch service for sun sync and polar orbits,” says Joe. These are both orbits that the UK is well-positioned for. A polar orbit is one that sees the satellite pass over both poles during one transit. Sun synchronous is an almost polar orbit, but the satellite moves in such a way to keep it in the same relative position to the sun, meaning that it passes over the same point of the Earth at the same time every day. For example, it could pass over a particular city every day at noon.

“We do this through our Skyrora XL which is our bigger rocket but I’ll start with our smaller rockets. The purpose of the smaller rockets is basically to build up flight experience and launch experience within Skyrora. But we started with our little Nano rocket which has had two test flights now.”

Testing the Skylark Rockets

The Skylark Nano is a single-stage unguided rocket. It is 2.4m tall with a 10cm diameter, it is a solid propellent rocket that has a max thrust of 1,825N and lift-off mass of 13.3kg which allows for a payload mass of up to 1kg. It can fly up to 6km. “The next one is the sky micro, which is a two stage supersonic rocket. Powered with solid state motors. It’s just a sounding rocket, which gives us a lot of practice and allows us to figure out how, how to work with a two-stage rocket.”

The Skylark Micro is 3.3m tall, 32kg lift-off mass and can reach 30km. Then comes the SkyHy, which is a two stage hybrid, which uses a solid fuel called HDPE and hydrogen peroxide as the oxidizer. “That one goes to an apogee of about 100 kilometres. It’s quite small, but goes far,” says Joe.

This height of100km is known as the Kármán Line, which is often used to mark the edge of space for legal and regulatory matters. “Then we go into our bigger pockets which is the Skyrora L which is the first of our larger rockets,” says Joe.

This involves a single stage lift off using liquid fuel, which is pressure fed that goes to an apogee of 100 kilometres and has to be launched from a mobile launch station. Skylark L, and other rockets of this size require more facilities on-site, as well as the ability to raise the rocket from a horizontal to a vertical position.

Finally comes the flagship, the Skyrora XL rocket. While the others have their uses and are of interest for research purposes, the XL is the goal for Skyrora’s commercial launch ambitions. The rocket is in three stages with a total length of 22.7m and a diameter of 2.2m, it has a lift-off mass of 55,838kg and can carry a payload of up to 315kg. This means that it can deliver satellites into sun-synchronous orbit anywhere in from 500 to 1,000km in altitude, or polar orbits of 200 to 1,000km. “That’s our main money-maker for Britain. That’s what we’re going to use for commercial flight,” says Joe.

And this rocket will be blasting off from British soil soon. Skyrora have an aggressive timeline planning to have first flight of the XL by the end of 2022 and commercialization started in 2023.

There are bigger rockets out there – Skyrora XL is a light class launch vehicle – but smaller asset owners have to rideshare on them, and make do with whatever parameters the primary customer has for the mission.

Seeking Capacity

“The big problem is within Europe, there’s no small satellite provider. So people have to go to either America or Asia or even Russia to fly their satellite,” says Joe and choice is limited with the prime customer dictating the mission requirements. “What we want to do at scale is create a dedicated service to allow the small shops to have the option to go to this orbit to that orbit to be able to fly when they want to fly, which is quite a novel, novel thing in this market,” says Joe.

The white heat of progress in the space sector is exhilarating. Before Joe joined, he was in established industry – the nuclear industry – working on facilities that were half a century old. “All old rust buckets, but interesting. Nevertheless, I got a lot of knowledge out of it,” he says.

Then one day, Joe was sitting at his computer and he had an epiphany. He noticed that his Google and Facebook feeds were full of rockets. “And from that point onwards, I was like, that’s what I want to do. So I resigned from my, from my previous job at the end of the year and went into look at the space industry. And launch vehicles in particular are just cool. At the end of the day, if you compare it, it’s like the bee’s knees of space.”

The change to working in the space sector was a breath of fresh air to Joe who had been working on nuclear reactors designed in the 1970s. He is particulatly excited about the pace of development in space technology and the ambition that underpins it with the UK Space Agency seeking to capture 10% of the world’s space market, which makes launch capability essential.

Getting into Space

This young, growing industry is on the brink of major expansion, but it needs new STEM talent to thrive and Joe has some important advice for young people who are interested in this sector and it isn’t all about maths and physics. “Space is an amazing place to be. But my main advice would probably be just study hard, work hard, and obviously, don’t neglect the extracurriculars. Because the main courses and the curriculum you get taught is quite generic, but it’s these extracurriculars. What gives you that interest in that passion to do what you actually want to do?”

In his own case, the answer was easy. At school, he studied maths, physics and further maths at Crossley Heath School in Halifax, West Yorkshire and then went on to study mechanical engineering at the University of Nottingham which involved taking a year to study abroad in Malaysia.  “But the basis of that is that I really picked up on the nonlinear dynamics. It kind of set my knowledge and experience and it’s just an interesting subject because it covers everything from natural occurrences so that chaos theory to like floater stability in rockets,” says Joe.

Although one thing Joe does regret, is not having more specialisation in his studies pointing to mechanical engineering as being quite generalised meaning tht he had to learn a lot on the job, a job which he is proud of and excited about. As he works hard with the team at Skyrora to prove rocket capabilities we will all be watching to see if the UK can successfully create its first launch capability in over fifty years.