Location - UK

Since this is the forum for discussing starting a company (which appears to have been extended to Amateur orbital spaceflight group ), I thought I'd compile a list of those who live in the UK who might/would be interested. At the moment I know of only about 4-5 space advocates who live in the UK - one of whom lives a few miles away from me in a neighbouring county.

So, who lives in the Sceptred Isles?

I live in the UK! Cambridgeshire to be a bit more specific. Not sure I'm too interested in starting a company though...not enough time as it is!

Always interested in this stuff though.

I've got a small flat in Chelsea which I use when I'm at work - does that count?

Don't have time to do anything else than my day job either, unfortunately.

Only just found this forum - I usually trawl through another. When I saw this thread I initially thought 'Great!' - then I saw the posting date...and the low number of replies Still, maybe it's worth giving this a bump by saying yes, I'm also in the UK and interested in getting a UK space company going - plenty of ideas, just no finance to do so Anyway, if anyone is still interested then who knows? Wouldn't it be amazing to see a UK SpaceX-style business get going - god knows it's about time we did something to try and get back in the game after throwing it all away in the 70's

Id quite happily give up some weekends to help someone launch their rockets or do anything fun. I know Starchaser worked from Dartmoor down my way for a bit, always an option if someone is driving through.

Name: Rob
Enthusiasm 10
Experience:0
Expertise: 0
Money:0

haha

Ok - so maybe we should bounce some ideas around about what would be required in order to start something perhaps? And by that I mean, what level of funding would realistically be needed, where to set up, what to do etc? I'll start the ball rolling since I can actually post now

Funding: To me this is dependent on what you plan to do I guess, so maybe that should be properly addressed later - but as a ballpark I would guess 10's of thousands running into 100's of thousands to really get a good start? Or is that over/under estimating?

Where: Well there are already facilities/office spaces that can be leased around Harwell and Guildford (Surrey Space Center), and you'd be in the thick of other space related businesses by taking up offices there. That or Culham perhaps are the main ones that spring to mind - all down South I admit, but then I'm based in Hampshire/Surrey anyway, so for me at least it makes sense

What: Now this is the real toughie. To my mind you can do one of two things - one, find a niche and exploit it, but if so then what niche and would it be profitable enough? And two, take the open approach and decide that you're going to try and cover the whole shooting match e.g. launchers, satellites, services, consultation etc etc.

To my mind covering all the bases means you stand a better chance of finding a profitable gap, and you're also in the position where you're not reliant on any external company/companies for sourcing essential items related to your products. As an example, I seem to remember hearing that originally Elon and SpaceX were going to outsource a lot of the work for making parts etc for their projects and then put them together in house, but due to being unable to get acceptable prices and delivery schedules they decided to just hire some talent to enable them to do the work in-house.

Anyway - that's the ball rolling, anyone else any thoughts?

Be good if there was a google map thing setup with anyone interested in helping space projects, a pin with a name and contact info perhaps skills too. Shame funding kills most things, Starchaser and Bristol Space Planes had better starts than most but money speaks volumes.

Interestingly enough has anyone got a list of UK companies already in the market or trying to get in?

I guess we have:

Starchaser
Bristol Space Planes
Reaction Engines
Virgin Galactic?
Spacefleet project
Cambridge Uni spaceflight

Probably office space is not the first thing you start looking for.

I would suggest doing the "Startup" course on Udacity, it is extremely informative for any noob like myself, and can be done in your freetime at nights or on weekends.

Based on the course material I have been through so far, a Startup's objective is to develop a businessplan through testing hypothesises and doing research.

So really you don't need an office. What you need is to figure out your product, your market, your available resources etc...and then going out there talking to potential customers, potential investors, potential competitors and testing all your hypothesises about how you imagined your business will be set up and run.

I would be interested in starting a space related business, but I have the same issue as others here. I work full time, and fitting in more work is quite hard. Not to mention being a complete noob in pretty much every field needed for starting and running a space business.

Sometimes I do feel like I am just making excuses and I am just too lazy to really dive into this field.

A possible business idea I have been ranting about for a while is figuring out crowd funding for all these small businesses that seem to want to pop up in the wake of large corporations. There is a lot of public and hobbyist interest, but finding funding seems to be hard because the general populus doesn't think the public belongs in space business.

Now we have spaceGAMBIT that secured enough funding from the american government to support a handful of projects around the globe. There was around 50 entries, but only a few of them will get the needed seedfunds to carry out the project. There are also campaigns on various crowd funding websites, but being so dispersed makes it hard to market the projects, and grouping up in one spot might help drawing more attention to all these projects as a whole.

Possible other business ideas is supplying hobby groups with components geared towards space related hardware building. Like what solarsystemexpress is trying to do with the gravity development board.

If the building of small scale space hardware is cheap enough for small companies or hobby groups to have a go at, then all these small companies might be able to leverage eachother's capabilities to join the big players on the playground.

Actually another possible niche might be affordable test facilities to test and validate the hardware before flight. It requires all sorts of vacuum chambers, radiation chambers etc... So another possible idea is to cater for the needs of small businesses to carry out such tests on small scale products like cubesats or nanosats, or various electric propulsion systems, laser communiaction systems etc...

It might be all gibberish I just talked about, I am no expert or anything.