Thursday, January 11, 2024

Orbex Names Tech Entrepreneur And Exspace Agency Chief To Lead Next Stage For Startup

Orbex Names Tech Entrepreneur And Exspace Agency Chief To Lead Next Stage For Startup

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Orbex, the British rocket company that aims to be one of the first to launch a satellite from British soil, has bolstered its management team ahead of its upcoming fundraising, naming the former space agency boss and technology entrepreneur as its new chairman and chief executive. .

Phillip Chambers, co-founder of employee engagement platform Peakon, will become CEO of Orbex, while Miguel Bela Mora, former CEO of the Spanish Space Agency, has been named executive chairman of the nine-year-old space startup.

Chambers, who sold Peakon to Workday for $700 million in 2021, said his job was to take Orbex “from startup to scale.” I have a lot of experience with it.”

According to Martin Coates, the former CEO who served as interim CEO following the sudden departure of the company's founder, Orbex has grown rapidly in recent years and is about to enter the next phase of development. and former CEO Chris Larmour in April. “We couldn’t maintain the opening mentality,” Coates told the FT in a recent interview. “Now we really need to mature as an organization.”

Orbex is one of dozens of European companies aiming to meet growing demand for launch services in low Earth orbit (LEO), the region 2,000 km above Earth. SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 rocket has reduced the cost of space launches and opened new commercial markets in LEO for activities such as Earth observation and broadband communications.

Orbex is developing the Prime Micro-Launcher, a 19-meter-long two-stage rocket designed to transport small satellites weighing up to 180 kg. The rocket is one of the smallest rockets under development in Europe and will be launched from a spaceport the company is building in northern Scotland. This is one of the facilities helping the UK Space Agency build a sovereign launch capacity.

However, according to Chambers and Coates, even before the first flight with Prime, Orbex discussed the possibility of developing a larger rocket to meet demand. According to analysts, this will require significant additional funds.

“Thoughts like that definitely happen,” Coates said. "This is a good start. This is the beginning of the career of this organization.”

“Logically it makes sense that if you want to bring prices down, all of this can only be done with a bigger rocket,” Chambers told the FT. “The question is how this will be supported financially.”

Chambers, who invested in Orbex when the company raised $40 million at the end of 2022. “Fundraising is something I’m pretty successful at,” he said. Orbex has raised £86.5 million after three rounds of fundraising, including support from the UK and Danish governments and the European Space Agency. At some point the company will have to raise more money. . . particularly from European investors," Chambers said.

Coates said the group may look for new funding next year as it expands the facility to meet its goal of launching within a month. However, he notes that this can be done in a variety of ways, including debt or asset-backed financing, as well as through equity rounds. In September, the startup posted an annual loss of £5.2 million for the year to the end of December 2022.

Orbex has not yet announced its initial launch date. But the team has confirmed six commercial contracts to launch satellites.

The company, which is headquartered in Scotland and has a design and testing center in Denmark, suffered several setbacks on the way to its first flight. The company was forced to take over the Sutherland spaceport in northern Scotland after Lockheed Martin abandoned the project in favor of another launch site, SaxaWord, in the Shetland Islands, off the north coast of Scotland. In December, the British Civil Aviation Authority granted SaxaVord a spaceport license.

Sutherland Spaceport's development efforts have also been hampered by environmental and Covid protests.

This story has been corrected to show that SaxaVord is located in Shetland, not the Hebrides as originally stated.

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