The outbreak of war in Ukraine could not halt a rocket manufacturer in its ambitions to become a major player in space from a base in central Scotland

 

As the biggest attack on a European country since the Second World War, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has led to hundreds of thousands of casualties, triggered a spike in global energy prices, and cut down on international food supplies. It has also had a “huge impact” on Scottish-based rocket manufacturer Skyrora, but chief executive Volodymyr Levykin remains focused on the bigger picture.

“So we [had to] revisit and reshape everything,” he says of Skyrora, which employs about half of its 120 staff in Mr Levykin’s homeland of Ukraine. “We closed everything which is publicly visible, offices and workshops in Ukraine, on the first day of the war, all for security reasons because being a rocket company in a war zone, that puts our people at risk.

“We moved people to work remotely…ironically because [of Covid] people mainly worked remotely anyway. We had to reinforce our British team and [gave] them more responsibilities and they successfully managed to move things forward, almost at the same speed as pre-war. But obviously it is a huge factor – we just keep going, right?”

A former chief operating officer and managing director of Cupid, a group of online dating websites based out of Edinburgh, Mr Levykin’s original career in IT led to him spending a couple of years in California’s Silicon Valley where he saw that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and biotechnology would be “the next big things”.

 

“I knew nothing about medicine and health and such things, but space appeared to be quite exciting plus it has Ukrainian connections,” he said.

“Ukraine used to be the space manufacturing hub of the Soviet Union. Most of the rockets were manufactured in Ukraine, so there is a lot of space expertise.”

Mr Levykin returned to Scotland and set up Skyrora in 2018 with his own funds plus backing from “friends and family”. The company is now manufacturing rockets in Cumbernauld where it expects to build up to 16 Skyrora XL vehicles annually to serve the commercial space sector.

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The next launch is expected to take place next year, preferably from the SaxaVord Spaceport in Shetland but possibly from Iceland where an initial launch attempt took place in late 2022. The location will be determined by which country’s aviation authorities are first to grant approval.

The invasion in February 2022 was a “complete shock”, Mr Levykin said, with everyone predicting the Russians would take “about three days to capture everything”. It turned out that was not the case, but the situation remains “always worried, always drama”.

“Right not of course it is less of a concern because they are quite far away from our locations,” he said. “We knew this after the first week of our fight, but never say never, right?

“So anyway we have scenarios in place to migrate everything, if [the Russians] move, to the west to protect the technology, but technology is secondary. To protect our people, that is number one.”