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Getting into the space industry involved a bit of luck, really. I’d done my first degree at Glasgow University and at the time – I graduated in 1994 – there weren’t really many jobs in the city. I went for a variety of jobs, and it just so happened that the only one I got offered was with a space company, Surrey Satellite Technologies.
Surrey was the pioneer of small satellites globally. It really was a start-up, although it was part of a university, so it was quite an academic environment but still very entrepreneurial. There were only about 20 staff when I joined but almost 200 people when I left 11 years later because my wife was pregnant with our second child and we wanted to move back to Scotland.
There was no space industry in Scotland, so there were no jobs for me. So my wife and I decided to start our own business. There was quite a lot of naivety, but I wrote my business plan and got us some support from Scottish Enterprise and went off and did it. I knew exactly what I needed to do and how much money I had to do it, so in a way the first year-and-a-half was the most stress-free time I’ve ever had with the business.
Once we started winning work, and delivering that work and having staff, and then having to make enough money from the work to pay our staff… I was an engineer, I wasn’t a business person. I’d say if you’re an engineer and you’re going to go and start a business, be prepared for the most difficult thing you’ve ever done in your life.
Craig Clark founded Clyde Space in 2005 and says his company was one of the first to spot the potential of cheap and light CubeSats (Credit: Clyde Space)
iPhone of space
I tried not to compete with Surrey Satellite Technologies – I wanted them as a customer, not as a competitor. But they’ve actually started to compete with us. I guess what that tells you is that you’ve been smarter about predicting where the market is going.
One of the things we did was to move away from ‘if it’s not invented here, it’s not worth it’. The idea for CubeSats wasn’t ours, I just thought it was a great idea. We were the first commercial company in the world to really understand the potential of CubeSats, tiny fully-functional satellites that can piggyback on other launches.
It took us about two years to get a contract in Europe, and then another two to get a contract in the UK. Unlike most businesses, we started far away and then worked our way back in – we made solar panels for a South African company, then power systems for a Japanese company and a US university, and two Malaysian CubeSats. The next opportunity for us is constellations. We’ve got a number of products that are constellation-based on the go, but they’re early-stage; over the next year we’ll go on to 50 or 100 satellites being produced.
Our customer base hasn’t changed too much – we’ve always supported US military organisations and research labs, NASA centres and large universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But we now have more commercial companies buying spacecraft from us, and established companies that are not typically from the space industry.
Ultimately, we want our spacecraft to be the ‘iPhone of space’, where you can use them for various applications. They’re pretty much the standard part that we improve by 20% every couple of years so each new generation is better.
(Lead image credit: Clyde Space)