Skyrora

Skyrora builds rockets in Cumbernauld, Scotland: Skylark L, an eleven-metre suborbital vehicle, and the three-stage Skyrora XL, meant to carry about 315 kilograms to polar orbit, with 3D-printed engines burning a kerosene refined from plastic waste. Volodymyr Levykin founded it in Edinburgh in 2017, drawing on Ukrainian rocket engineering heritage.

The bet is that Britain will sustain a sovereign launch industry, and that the first licensed, vertically integrated British launcher flying from Scottish soil collects the government work that follows. In 2025 it became the first UK company licensed for vertical launch from home ground, up to sixteen Skylark L flights a year from SaxaVord in Shetland.

No Skyrora vehicle has reached space. Its highest flight is a 2020 demonstrator that touched about 27 kilometres from Iceland, and the one Skylark L attempt, from Iceland in 2022, ended 300 metres up when a software fault put the vehicle in the sea. The orbital XL has slipped from 2023 to around 2028, and the market it bet on has already consumed Orbex, whose assets Skyrora moved to take up in 2026. The license and the factory are real; space, nine years in, is still pending.