Rocket company Orbex (Orbital Express Launch) is going through a financial restructuring. Its Danish subsidiary is moving into bankruptcy. However, a potential buyer is looking at the company with a take-over of its assets. The Exploration Company (TEC) said last week that it was working with Orbex and the UK government to combine their businesses and to “reinforce” prospects for UK-based rocket launches.

TEC is a German/French business with contracts in place to provide a cargo-carrying return vehicle to commercial space stations. TEC has signed a ‘Letter of Intent’ to acquire Orbex but any deal will need the UK government’s approval. Britain had initially set aside €112.3 million as part of the European Space Agency’s European Launcher Challenge (ELC) open competition to go to Orbex. That payment was pulled, at least for the time being.

Part of the ELC remit was that a recipient had to match incoming Space Agency cash with money from their own resources.

A January 23rd item within Space Intel Report reveals that Orbex CEO Phil Chambers confirm that he had been in talks with The Exploration Company for “months” about joining forces.

Orbex has a number of appealing projects in its portfolio, not least its upcoming Proxima rocket. TEC’s founder and CEO Hélène Huby freely admits that Orbex’s launch skills are of interest: “What we are discussing with the UK government is a reinforcement of its launcher strategy. We will not use the money to do something different than launchers — it wouldn’t make sense. There have been competencies developed by Orbex and we want to leverage

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Categories: Articles, Satellite

Tags: orbex, rocket, satellite