Soaring ambition that's out of this world

For Clyde Space, the Glasgow-based company that developed the spacecraft as part of a national collaborative programme, the launch last July aboard a Russian Soyuz-2 rocket was a critical watershed.

"We have really seen this business turn the corner in the past year or so," says CEO Craig Clark. "We have now moved from being a start-up company to becoming an established player in the global space marketplace."

Founded 10 years ago, Clyde Space has recently moved to new premises at Glasgow's Skypark, which trebled its manufacturing and design space and will enable it to install its own ground station to track satellites for customers. The relocation from the West of Scotland Science Park came after an announcement that the company had won orders worth hundreds of thousands of pounds from the United States Air Force Academy and the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy.

This type of rapid growth, Clark says, is making Scotland a leader in the space industry. The Government believes that over the next 20 years the sector has the potential to grow to a £40 billion industry and create another 100,000 jobs - and Clark has said that £5bn of this and up to 10,000 jobs could be generated in Scotland.

"We were one of the very first companies to operate in the market of CubeSats - more than 40 per cent of all CubeSat missions fly Clyde Space software, which is more than any other vendor," he says. It's a market that is growing very quickly: we had been investing time and money for some time and that has come to fruition. We have become more visible to people in the past year or so and people have started to take notice of us."

The diminutive CubeSats are capable of carrying multiple payloads and can be used for applications from astrophysics experimentation to tracking ships and taking high-resolution photographs.

"Small satellites are increasingly seen as the new big industry to invest in. There are hundreds of millions of dollars being injected into that area and we are seeing a large increase in orders from that kind of company at the moment," says Clark.

Clyde Space achieved record annual revenues of £2 million to April last year, nearly double that of the previous 12 months with profits of some £120,000. Clark explains in a market that is still emerging there remains a gap between the technology and its applications.

"The industry is split into 'upstream' and 'downstream' space," he says. The upstream sector represents those constructing satellites while many companies, such as Sky Television, use downstream space to deliver their services. Downstream represents by far the biggest income for the UK space industry and these are the people we are trying to connect to."

And because of CubeSat technology, more and more companies can gather data or track assets for a fraction of the cost they faced only 10 years ago, when Clyde Space was founded with £50,000 of Clark's own money and significant investment from private equity companies Coralinn LLP and Nevis Capital.

Clark had returned to home soil from Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, where he was head of the power team and gained his MSc in Satellite Engineering. "I've been working in the space industry for 20 years now and have worked on dozens of satellites so I know how to put one together," he says with disarming pragmatism

The launch of Scotland's first satellite, however was a "massive thing" for the company.

"It was really a technology demonstration mission but for us the main thing was to produce our own satellite and then use the lessons we learned from that to make the next one better."

Payloads in UKube-1, a collaboration between the UK Space Agency, industry and academia, include the first global positioning system device to measure plasmaspheric space weather (in the region of dense, cold plasma that surrounds Earth) and a camera that will take images of Earth and test the effect of radiation on space hardware using a new generation of imaging sensor.

What sets Clyde Space apart, Clark believes, is both its unrivalled experience in small satellite missions and its ability to innovate. One such innovation is the online CubeSat shop, where the company almost casually announces that you can "maybe also buy a satellite or two with your credit card".

Sure enough, click on the 'CubeSat Lab' and up pop options for a platform, batteries and solar panels, on-board computers and other accessories. With satellites for fairly advanced missions costing about $300,000 north of my credit card limit this is as far as I get - but Clark is enthusiastic about the online side of the business.

"Online has always been very important as our customers are global and we are based in Glasgow - and if you need to answer every single technical enquiry while trying to sell our products at a relatively low cost that will start to eat into margins so we try to put enough information on the website to enable people to make a judgment call."

This impressive array of technology requires an equally stellar team and Clark's is studded with graduates and post-graduates. He concedes that early in the company's history recruitment was difficult but says he is now focusing on hiring people with masters or PhD degrees and that Clyde Space is now attracting the top students in engineering courses in Scotland and beyond, including Spain and the US.

"Because of the work we have been doing over the past years and because of the fantastic universities we have, Glasgow is a great place for a space company. What we really want to do is attract the application companies, the downstream companies, to come here and utilise the pool of graduates we have in software and engineering. Most of the space industry in the UK is in the south-east of England, where the cost of living is relatively high; coming to Scotland can be quite an attractive option and Glasgow is a great place to work and bring up a family."

With 40 employees, a number Clark hopes to grow to 50 later this year, there remain the down-to-Earth challenges of running a rapidly growing business. Initially, he and his wife Lynn took on most of the work themselves but now he has managers for operations, finance and sales. This allows him, he says, to step back and delegate.

"That can be tough in a business that is growing so fast and I'm still heavily involved, but my main job is strategy - keeping an eye on the market, bidding on the right work so that we can continue to grow and be the best at what we do.

"One of the things I'm most proud of this year is not just launching our first satellite - which is great - but that the business is performing so well. We have a superb team and we are actually starting to attract companies to Scotland: Glasgow is now considered the epicentre of small satellite development because of the work we have been doing."

Fast facts: CRAIG CLARK

Born 1973.

Educated Greenfaulds High School, Cumbernauld. BEng (Hons) University of Glasgow, MSc in Satellite Engineering, University of Surrey.

Founded Clyde Space in 2005.

Awarded an MBE in 2013 in the Queen's Birthday Honours List

for Services to Technology and Innovation.

Married to Lynn, with two children.

Member of the UK Space Leadership Council, Entrepreneurial Exchange, British Interplanetary

Society, Institution Engineering and Technology, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Interests: Science fiction; playing the drums for orchestras, big bands and rock bands.