The failure of Virgin Orbit’s maiden business satellite tv for pc launch from British soil, and the corporate’s subsequent submitting for chapter safety, could have appeared like a deadly blow for the U.Okay.’s nascent house sector.

However a variety of firms hope to play a key position within the enterprise of constructing, launching and working satellites, a $281 billion business which has been rising quickly over the previous decade.

Billionaire-backed firms like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit have been revolutionizing the house business over the past decade, which has seen advances in re-usable rockets, the deployment of hundreds of small communication satellites and new launch websites opened.

To learn the way smaller U.Okay.-based corporations want to compete, CNBC visited a spaceport being constructed within the far north of the Shetland Islands, a longtime satellite-builder and a startup aiming to see one in every of its re-usable satellites lastly make it into house.