I can see it will merely be a matter of time before an accident happens involving highly volatile rocket fuel and half the island is blown to hell.
At a time when billionaire Elon Musk is unveiling revised plans to travel to the Moon and Mars, while predicting city-to-city transport using rockets right here on Earth, an Australian entrepreneur has chosen Singapore as his base to build his own space startup and carve out a niche of his own.
The space race might have started in the mid-1950s, but it's not over yet. Western economies have traditionally played a dominant role in the space industry, yet activity in the Asia Pacific region is heating up. China, for example, has made known its ambition to become a space superpower by 2030, while the Australian government has just announced that it is launching a space agency of its own. With more and more players jumping in to join the space race revival, could tiny Singapore also have a role to play?
Businessman Adam Gilmour thinks so and is leading the charge with his company Gilmour Space Technologies. On a recent tour of his rocket factory located near Changi airport in Singapore, I discovered an open-plan facility buzzing with activity and packed with futuristic-looking prototypes. The morning I arrived, his engineers were busy testing a new 3-D printer, which makes rocket fuel in record time. Without missing a beat, he led me to one of the meeting rooms and started sketching on a whiteboard, explaining to me the velocity and power needed to get satellites into the earth’s lower orbit, then onwards to the Moon and Mars.
Gilmour Space Technologies
Adam Gilmour with a model of his Eris orbital vehicle, capable of carrying 380kg to low earth orbit
More on Forbes: How Satellites Could Make Singapore A Spacetech Leader
“We are working on low-cost small satellite launch vehicles to take satellites with masses up to 400 kilogram to orbit. This capability is matched by few other providers in the industry and we plan to be the cheapest in the market” he explained. He has a very pragmatic approach to what his company is trying to achieve: “Launch vehicles are like busses, their only job is to take packages to orbit,” he says. His team is also working on an interplanetary cube satellite propulsion system that would take up to 20 kilogram payloads to a Moon or Mars orbit.
As we spoke, I brought our conversation back down to Earth for a moment, to learn about his childhood in Australia and how he ended up in the space industry. One of Gilmour’s earliest memories is of his parents giving him a toy rocket after a trip they took to the Kennedy Space Centre in the United States. The young Adam, only five years old at the time, vividly remembers how excited he felt, and never abandoned his dream of owning a real rocket one day.
Soon after graduating from Monash University in Melbourne, he joined Citibank in Australia as a foreign exchange trader and over twenty years built his career there, working his way up to Managing Director in charge of regional sales business for financial markets based in Singapore. As part of his job, he dealt with the bank’s largest customers, but also with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Watching these SME’s grow impacted him profoundly. “Being part of their journey over the years inspired me to take a chance and break out on my own,” he recounted. Gilmour saw the space industry as one with huge opportunities. If the costs of launching rockets into space could be significantly reduced, he felt this was an industry he could get into.
More on Forbes: Why Europe Lost The Crown Of 'World's Strongest Passport' To Singapore
In 2012, financing the company mostly on his own, he set up Gilmour Space Technologies in Singapore and Brisbane and hired his brother James Gilmour as his first employee. In June 2017, his latest S$5.15 million Series A venture capital funding round with investors came through, bringing the company valuation to over $15 million.
Gilmour is bullish about Singapore’s potential to play a leading role in the ASEAN space race, because he believes the country has unique advantages that could make it an ideal HQ for launches. “The fact Singapore is on the equator - an ideal latitude to launch rockets from - is an advantage. There is also enough space here to build rockets. There are factories here that are as large as SpaceX’s rocket factory in the United States and most small satellites don’t even need large factories to build them, a standard 2000-3000 square foot factory space would do,” says Gilmour.
Indeed, Singapore already has world-class universities, two of which have satellite-building capabilities, and getting into the space industry doesn’t require the capital it needed 20 years ago -- Gilmour is living proof of this reality. An even more exciting prospect is that space entrepreneurs appear confident in choosing Singapore as a base, believing that the country will be able to build a highly competitive space industry of its own in the near future.
At a time when billionaire Elon Musk is unveiling revised plans to travel to the Moon and Mars, while predicting city-to-city transport using rockets right here on Earth, an Australian entrepreneur has chosen Singapore as his base to build his own space startup and carve out a niche of his own.
The space race might have started in the mid-1950s, but it's not over yet. Western economies have traditionally played a dominant role in the space industry, yet activity in the Asia Pacific region is heating up. China, for example, has made known its ambition to become a space superpower by 2030, while the Australian government has just announced that it is launching a space agency of its own. With more and more players jumping in to join the space race revival, could tiny Singapore also have a role to play?
Businessman Adam Gilmour thinks so and is leading the charge with his company Gilmour Space Technologies. On a recent tour of his rocket factory located near Changi airport in Singapore, I discovered an open-plan facility buzzing with activity and packed with futuristic-looking prototypes. The morning I arrived, his engineers were busy testing a new 3-D printer, which makes rocket fuel in record time. Without missing a beat, he led me to one of the meeting rooms and started sketching on a whiteboard, explaining to me the velocity and power needed to get satellites into the earth’s lower orbit, then onwards to the Moon and Mars.
Adam Gilmour with a model of his Eris orbital vehicle, capable of carrying 380kg to low earth orbit
More on Forbes: How Satellites Could Make Singapore A Spacetech Leader
“We are working on low-cost small satellite launch vehicles to take satellites with masses up to 400 kilogram to orbit. This capability is matched by few other providers in the industry and we plan to be the cheapest in the market” he explained. He has a very pragmatic approach to what his company is trying to achieve: “Launch vehicles are like busses, their only job is to take packages to orbit,” he says. His team is also working on an interplanetary cube satellite propulsion system that would take up to 20 kilogram payloads to a Moon or Mars orbit.
As we spoke, I brought our conversation back down to Earth for a moment, to learn about his childhood in Australia and how he ended up in the space industry. One of Gilmour’s earliest memories is of his parents giving him a toy rocket after a trip they took to the Kennedy Space Centre in the United States. The young Adam, only five years old at the time, vividly remembers how excited he felt, and never abandoned his dream of owning a real rocket one day.
Soon after graduating from Monash University in Melbourne, he joined Citibank in Australia as a foreign exchange trader and over twenty years built his career there, working his way up to Managing Director in charge of regional sales business for financial markets based in Singapore. As part of his job, he dealt with the bank’s largest customers, but also with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Watching these SME’s grow impacted him profoundly. “Being part of their journey over the years inspired me to take a chance and break out on my own,” he recounted. Gilmour saw the space industry as one with huge opportunities. If the costs of launching rockets into space could be significantly reduced, he felt this was an industry he could get into.
More on Forbes: Why Europe Lost The Crown Of 'World's Strongest Passport' To Singapore
In 2012, financing the company mostly on his own, he set up Gilmour Space Technologies in Singapore and Brisbane and hired his brother James Gilmour as his first employee. In June 2017, his latest S$5.15 million Series A venture capital funding round with investors came through, bringing the company valuation to over $15 million.
Gilmour is bullish about Singapore’s potential to play a leading role in the ASEAN space race, because he believes the country has unique advantages that could make it an ideal HQ for launches. “The fact Singapore is on the equator - an ideal latitude to launch rockets from - is an advantage. There is also enough space here to build rockets. There are factories here that are as large as SpaceX’s rocket factory in the United States and most small satellites don’t even need large factories to build them, a standard 2000-3000 square foot factory space would do,” says Gilmour.
Indeed, Singapore already has world-class universities, two of which have satellite-building capabilities, and getting into the space industry doesn’t require the capital it needed 20 years ago -- Gilmour is living proof of this reality. An even more exciting prospect is that space entrepreneurs appear confident in choosing Singapore as a base, believing that the country will be able to build a highly competitive space industry of its own in the near future.
