by For someone at the forefront of the UK space travel industry, Steve Bennett’s life couldn’t be further from Elon Musk’s. After celebrating his 60th birthday, the CEO of Starchaser Industries told the FIRs he spent it on his narrowboat in Nantwich.
Starchaser Industries is an aerospace company based in Hyde which Steve started in 1992. A company born out of his boyhood interest in space travel which started with the Apollo landing on the moon in 1969.
“I didn’t watch it because I was five years old and my mother wouldn’t let me,” laughed Steve. “It was about three o’clock in the morning. I asked her ‘can I stay up and watch it?’ and she said no, you have had your sleep but there will be another.”
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He has since admitted that he was ‘extremely drawn towards space exploration’. But his own path to stardom did not take a conventional path, if ever there was one for a boy from Dukinfield.
He spent his childhood building a chemistry laboratory, and launching homemade rockets to the amazement of his family and friends. After leaving school he worked as a laboratory technician before joining the Army in 1983.
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Working his way up to Lance Corporal he trained as a petroleum operator. After his time in the forces, he went back to work as a laboratory technician and then later as a lecturer in physics at the University of Salford.
But it wasn’t until he was in his 30s with a family of his own, that he decided to follow his dream of becoming a space travel pioneer, creating Starchaser Industries. Much of the company’s early ambitions were focused on winning the X Prize – a competition with a 10 million dollar prize for the first non-governmental organization to launch a reusable crewed spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.
Mojave Aerospace Ventures eventually won it in 2004 for its SpaceShipOne. Richard Branson later licensed the winning technology to create Virgin Galactic – a British-American space flight company. It was a relaxing moment for Steve who had been working for years on a shoestring budget.
“When I was working on the X Prize, I raised millions of pounds and I thought we were well on our way. But that design won the X Prize because they spent 25 million dollars to prize 10 to win a million dollars. That’s the kind of money you have to put into it.
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“If you look at the money that Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (founder of the shopping giant Amazon and the aerospace company Blue Origin) are putting in, it’s a lot of money. I’m not saying that’s bad , it’s just very sobering. I thought I could do it for about £10 million and there’s no way it’s that much,” he said.
Although Starchaser has never had anything like the budget of those with deep pockets like Branson, Musk and Bezos, they have come to the party relatively late compared to Steve, who started launching his rockets from the Morecambe Bay sites and Ministry of Defense (MOD) in the 1990s and 2000s. Instead, he had to fundraise and tour the schools, he says, to help keep the lights on.
He is a constant source of frustration, not helped by what he sees as a lack of ambition by the UK government. “We have not received any support from the government at all, which is very upsetting,” he said.
“You have the UK Space Agency and they have a significant budget. They provide funding but they put it in a bit of a pickle and there’s so much horror that we can’t qualify for it. It’s very, very frustrating. “
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Another obstacle he says is the lack of help in finding a suitable launch site for Starchaser’s latest rocket, Astra-X – a fully reusable nine-metre rocket weighing around 800kg. The rocket has been ready to launch for 18 months but Steve says they can’t find anywhere to launch it.
It has previously been able to launch its rockets from MOD sites, but says the current tensions over the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine have been canceled at the last minute. Another once productive launch site is Morecambe Bay, but since the last successful launch there in 2000, it has been lamenting that the hierarchy has changed. This, he says, has resulted in Astra-X’s launch being shelved until a suitable launch site can be found.
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But, regardless of the obstacles placed in his way, it is the same sense of childhood wonder at the moon landing that Steve still gets up in the morning to continue his work. And his Hyde-based space travel company still has big ambitions.
“One thing that always drove me was that I always wanted to go on a trip into space. From a completely personal and selfish point of view,” he says.
“I have the technology to do it, I just need the support to finish this project. That’s what I want to do and I want to bring people with me. We have already sold tickets on the first flight myself but I just want to share this with as many people as possible.
“We’re doing things in Manchester and we’re really making progress. We’re physically making this equipment and testing it but it’s very difficult to get funding or investors.
“I’ve created a new type of concept for launching a rocket and I need to get funding for that. It’s basically an electric drive to get the rocket up there.
“Imagine a completely reusable rocket using electricity instead of chemicals.” This technology, says Steve, would be reusable, extremely safe and reliable, which would mean that costs would come down. He hopes to involve universities and bright graduate students in his all-electric rocket launch system to build a workable prototype for testing.
So while Starchaser’s current space travel ambitions revolve around launching Astra-X and developing innovative launch technologies, what predictions does he see happening for space travel in 25 years? “It really is anyone’s game, it really is,” says Steve.
“The space industry will be huge. At the moment SpaceX is leading the market with what they are doing – rockets you can launch a dozen times or more.
“But I think that the space limit is going to open up. It is going to develop in ways that we cannot imagine at the moment. There will be a lot of money to be made.
“People will be able to take holidays in space, and I’m not just talking about putting on a space suit and going up on a short hop into space. There will be space hotels, like cruise ships.
“You know how you go on a cruise around the Caribbean, in 25 years I can see people taking cruise ships in space going around the Earth, or to the moon and back. The technology to do this around for 50 years, it just needs someone to bring it together.”
Maybe someone like Steve, despite his company and ambitions being something of a ‘square pig in a round hole’ according to the space entrepreneur.
Or maybe someone like Elon Musk, who seems to have the ambition and finances to push the limits of space travel. “I met with Elon Musk a few times,” says Steve. The first when he was sitting next to him at an X Prize fundraising dinner in New York circa 2003.
“The next time I met him was about a year later, at a ‘brainstorming’ event in New Mexico, where the New Mexico government wanted to hear from experts in the space industry about ideas for their spaceport develop a new one. Again, I.
Despite the fact that the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is an ‘odd character’, according to Steve ‘he is doing great things’. Adding: “I can’t say more about it. It’s very innovative.”
Steve and Starchaser are currently actively looking for a launch site for Astra-X, and are asking private landowners to get in touch. “If we can get permission from the landowners we can get permission from the Civil Aviation Authority – and we can launch this rocket,” he said.
They are also relaunching their Space4school programme, which it says is meant to inspire current and future generations. Motorists are often surprised to see Steve driving one of his own rockets on the back of a lorry, going to and from school visits.
He believes this part of Starchaser’s work is extremely important. Not only to help fund his own company’s ambitions and ‘keep the lights on’, but to inspire the next generation of space travel innovators.
More information on the Astra-X and Space4schools Starchaser projects can be found on their website.
