The UK’s space ambitions have been the subject of many news items in the past year and through that time some quite interesting and unusual facts have arisen as commentators research their articles prior to publication.
We have, ourselves, written a number of articles on the subject when curious about whether this ambition could be impacted by Brexit or indeed the Scottish independence question. The answer always seemed to be that the European Space Agency was not an EU organisation and as such its relationship with the UK Space Agency also had no connection to the EU whatsoever. Which, of course, makes sense.
And yet, when we see the subject arise, it appears to be met with challenge and is often shut down quite promptly. This, of course, just triggers further curiosity, leading to further questions. But, then something unusual happened.
One of the more significant outlets for news on the UK’s space industry and the general topic of Brexit is Forbes magazine online edition. And, as those are subjects that we are interested in keeping an eye on, we subscribe to notifications when those arise in articles published online. On 16th May we received a notification flagging up keywords related to UK Space and Brexit, so we rushed over to read the article. It was a fairly generic piece that slanted towards the UK Government’s bad spending choices during the Brexit debacle. The author mentioned the embarrassing actions of Transport Minister, Chris Grayling, spending millions on contracts with ferry companies that had no ferries, which got huge media coverage at the time. He also covered the millions of pounds granted to Lockheed Martin and other companies such as Danish rocket company, Orbex, who at the time had no production facilities in UK, and as far as anybody knew, had no rockets.
Of course, this wasn’t necessarily related to Brexit, but it seems the author was simply looking to draw on some examples of poor spending decisions and lack of accountability for a Government that is in apparent disarray. All very reasonable. So, when we revisited the article to extract some references that we could include in something we were working on, you can imagine our surprise when we discovered the article had been removed. It was gone completely.
Then we remembered something!
When we joined in a conversation on twitter in which we simply mentioned that Orbex’s production facility was in Denmark and the Directors ALL lived in Germany or DENMARK, they immediately blocked us. A recent check has also shown that original twitter conversation has been deleted.
ACTIVE DIRECTORS: Germany & Denmark
Chris Larmour: Founder. Appointed May 2015. Lives in Germany
Albert Markus, Investor. Lives in Germany. Appointed May 2018 (2 months before govt. funding announced, so funding likely already secured)
Jimmy Nielsen. Managing Partner. Lives in Denmark. Appointed May 20128 (also at time when UK Gov funding secured)
Kristian Von Bengtson. Founder. Lives in Denmark. June 2015
RESIGNED DIRECTORS: USA & UK (All resigned May 2018 once UKGov funding secured & replaced by Danish & German nationals)
So, we checked their twitter account and true to form, it appears they were instrumental in having this article unpublished from Forbes online and managed to do so within 48 hours of its publication. Quite an astonishing feat to be honest. Not one single tweet mentioned why they were so eager to have the article brought down. Other than a series of tweets shouting about how British they are which included a bizarre photograph of a group of mostly male, pale & stale Scandinavian men in suits stood in front of their brand new facility in Scotland. Not quite the image that would suggest they were in front of a “factory” or any sort of fabrication facility where actual things were being made.
This then raises the question of why Orbex are so eager to have such heavy handed control over any news items that mentions them and to (quite astonishingly) have new items completely obliterated from the internet simply on request and why they are so keen to block anybody mentioning their journey so far, their operating base or how they came about getting access to UK government funding. All very legitimate angles that decent people would be keen to know the answers to, given that UK taxpayer’s money is being used here. And the people of the UK are particularly keen on transparency and very cynical of those seeking to block any moves towards improved transparency and accountability.
Thanks to the internet’s permanence (to a certain extent) we managed to secure a copy of the full text of the Forbes article from archive.org. A thorough examination of the piece did highlight some very minor errors, such as referring to EU Space Agency instead of European Space Agency, but those were really such minor, irrelevant errors that we came to the conclusion that the only aspect of the story that Orbex has taken issue with is the mention of them having no registered presence in the country. Their follow up comments on twitter also suggest they have taken issue with this. However, it is in fact correct. They do not have a registered entity in Scotland at all. Yes, they have a company registered in England, but as you can see above ALL current directors are located in either Denmark or Germany, and in recent online articles they have confirmed that design and manufacturing was done in Copenhagen, Denmark and their rocket engine was manufactured in Germany (and all of this before they opened their “factory” in Scotland a few months ago).
So, we can see where the author was going with his comments.
However, the big question remains… was any of this enough to merit bringing the article down? From what we can see… no!
So, what was said that was so bad that it should have been completely obliterated from the internet and which powers enforced such an action?
Those questions remain unanswered for now, but we will let readers make up their own minds.
Brexit and Other News 