Orbex Brand Guidelines: The Forres Rocket Maker That Closed Before Prime Flew

A crowdfunded Moon shot that became a launch company.

Orbex began in 2015 under another name. On 1 October 2015 Space.com reported the start of a Kickstarter campaign for Moonspike, a plan to crowdfund a small rocket that would send a titanium payload to the Moon. Its co-founders, the site said, were the space entrepreneur Chris Larmour and Kristian von Bengtson, also a co-founder of the Danish amateur rocket group Copenhagen Suborbitals. The design then called for a two-stage, liquid-fuelled launcher, with most of the work done in-house by a team of seven.

The campaign did not reach its goal. English Wikipedia says the company was renamed Orbital Express Launch Ltd. in 2016 and turned to a commercial business: launching small satellites into polar and sun-synchronous low Earth orbits. The short form, Orbex, became the name it traded under. TechCrunch, writing in April 2024, also dated the company’s founding to 2015.

The business settled in the north-east of Scotland. Its headquarters and factory were in Forres, in Moray, with production and testing in Scotland and design and testing facilities in Denmark, according to a company statement carried by Satnews in December 2024. That statement listed its backers as the Scottish National Investment Bank, BGF, Octopus Ventures, Heartcore Capital and High-Tech Gründerfonds, along with Elecnor, parent of Deimos Space, and the engineering group Jacobs.

The UK government took an early interest. In July 2018 The Guardian reported that the UK Space Agency had given money to Orbex, “a British space company which is developing a rocket called Prime”, alongside a larger award to Lockheed Martin, as part of plans by the development agency Highlands and Islands Enterprise for a vertical spaceport on the A’ Mhòine peninsula in Sutherland, on Scotland’s north coast.

Prime, Kinloss and a change of spaceport.

Prime was the company’s only rocket to reach full-scale hardware. European Spaceflight described it in October 2022 as a 19-metre, two-stage launcher designed to carry payloads of up to 180 kilograms to low Earth orbit. Its first stage had six additively manufactured engines burning liquid oxygen and bio-LPG, a renewable liquid gas fuel developed by the gas company Calor; the second stage used a single vacuum version of the same engine. Engine hot-fire tests had begun in 2018, the same report said, and earlier in 2022 Orbex had stacked a complete Prime at its test site in Kinloss for integration tests and rehearsals of rollout and fuelling.

The design was meant to be reused. In April 2024 TechCrunch described Reflight, a patented interstage structure the company planned to add: after the stages separated, four “petals” would fold out and, with a parachute, slow the booster for a splashdown at sea. TechCrunch noted that Orbex had not yet set a date for a first flight.

Plans changed in late 2024. In a statement published by Satnews on 8 December 2024, Orbex said it would pause construction of its own spaceport in Sutherland and launch its first rockets from SaxaVord Spaceport in Shetland instead, keeping the Sutherland lease to allow for more launch capacity later. The money would go to Proxima, a new medium-sized launcher, and to more manufacturing capacity in Forres. Chief executive Phil Chambers said the decision would help the company reach a first launch in 2025.

In July 2025 the European Space Agency preselected Orbex as one of five companies — with Isar Aerospace, Rocket Factory Augsburg, PLD Space and MaiaSpace — for the next phase of its European Launcher Challenge, European Spaceflight reported on 7 July 2025.

How launch companies present themselves.

Launch companies sell something few customers ever see up close, so their public image is built almost entirely from pictures and broadcasts. The familiar set is a rocket standing on its pad at dawn or under floodlights, the long-exposure streak of an ascent across a night sky, and the plume photographed from miles down the coast. Engine test stands supply a second genre: a horizontal or downward jet of fire, usually shot from a safe distance, which stands in for years of engineering that is otherwise invisible.

Factories are shown the other way round. Clean white halls, rows of tank sections, workers in coveralls and cleanroom suits suggest order and repetition rather than drama. Many launches are also accompanied by a mission patch, a small embroidered emblem in the tradition of NASA crew patches, which turns a single flight into something that can be collected and worn.

The countdown livestream has become a format in its own right, with hosts, telemetry overlays and replays of the booster or upper stage. Not every company has worked this way: in April 2016 Inverse described one maker that gave a day’s notice of its flights and published an edited highlights video afterwards, with no live webcast. Coverage now often runs alongside posts from executives on social media, which journalists quote in their reports.

The industry also meets in person. The Space Symposium in Colorado Springs and the International Astronautical Congress, which moves to a different host city each year, are where companies unveil models, sign agreements and show their identities on stands and banners. This guide looks at what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, what it has flown, and what it says about itself.

Insolvency in 2026, and a sale of the Forres factory.

Prime never flew. In December 2025 the European space logistics start-up The Exploration Company opened talks to buy Orbex, and on 21 January 2026 the two announced a letter of intent, European Spaceflight reported on 11 February 2026. The deal fell through. On 20 January Orbex had closed its rocket engine factory in Denmark, where the subsidiary that ran it filed for bankruptcy; on 11 February the company filed notice of its intention to appoint administrators, formally beginning insolvency proceedings, after its fundraising, merger and acquisition efforts had “concluded unsuccessfully”, the same report said. English Wikipedia gives 18 February 2026 as the day Orbex ceased operations.

What remained was sold. On 1 October 2026 TheBusinessDesk.com reported that the Portuguese space technology group Omnidea had acquired Orbex’s UK manufacturing assets and intellectual property, and would set up UK operations in the former Orbex factory in Forres with an initial team of former Orbex staff. Portugal Global, the Portuguese trade agency’s news service, added on 6 October 2026 that the site would become Omnidea’s UK centre for structures and for flight and ground-system electronics; the two companies had already worked together in the European Launcher Challenge. Orbex itself no longer trades.

For a design guide, Orbex shows how a launch start-up built its story around places — a Moray factory, a test site at Kinloss, a Highland spaceport plan and a rocket called Prime — and how that story ended in 2026 before a first launch. Compare PLD Space, another small-launcher company preselected by ESA in 2025, and Rocket Lab, whose Electron was the rocket TechCrunch compared Prime with in 2024. For this guide we use a slate grey, a dark ink, a pale mist and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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