Portugal rocket startup Ominidea acquires most of bankrupt Orbex’s assets
Portugal’s proposed spaceport on Santa Maria Island
The Portugal rocket startup Ominidea has now acquired a large majority of the assets left over when the British rocket startup Orbex went bankrupt earlier this year.
Omnidea submitted its offer in March 2026 as part of a competitive process managed by Orbex’s administrators. Omnidea said the transaction subsequently received the necessary foreign direct investment and export-control approvals from authorities in the United Kingdom and Denmark before closing on 30 September.
The acquisition includes two of the three buildings Orbex previously operated in Forres, Scotland, along with manufacturing equipment, tools, material stocks, processes and intellectual property. Omnidea also acquired data from both Orbex’s UK and Danish operations, as well as the Orbex brand and associated assets.
The company plans to revise Orbex’s Prime rocket under a new name, PrimeNEO. It has announced no launch schedule, but says once it is closer to launch it will consider launch sites in both the United Kingdom or Portugal’s proposed spaceport on Santa Maria island in the Azores.
The UK location is close to where Orbex’s rocket manufacturing facility is located, but the UK is also home to a lot of red tape that contributed strongly to the bankruptcy of Orbex as well as Virgin Orbit. The Santa Maria site is less developed, but it is in Portugal, where this company is based. If it was up to me, I’d choose Santa Maria, shifting those UK operations to Portugal. That would not only consolidate things, saving money, it would likely help garner support from the Portuguese government.
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It seems the UK is much quicker to approve the sale of private assets, than their use.
“”It seems the UK is much quicker to approve the sale of private assets, than their use.””
Reminds me of driving south on Interstate Hwy 5 in California. On the side of the freeway are dried-up, dead farms and orchards. Some of them have customized signage: Pelosi Caused Drought. Local governments would purchase the land for 10 cents on the dollar. They would then carve them up into parcels, selling them to strip mall developers and the like.
PLD Space in Spain and now these folks in Portugal. More than five centuries after Prince Henry the Navigator and Christopher Columbus, the nations of the Iberian Peninsula are once more players in pushing into vast and trackless places even if not exactly in the pioneering fashion of their forbears.
I think Mr. Z’s advice is generally good. But, given that it seems likely to be some time before whatever PrimeNEO turns out to be is launch-ready, it might be cheaper to continue using the recently-acquired Orbex assets in-situ and hope for the accession of a Reform-Restore coalition government in the UK at the next election. Meanwhile, a hedging of bets on launch sites would seem prudent.
Those assets in the UK are probably very easy to move. Factories for small rockets are generally simply large empty floors big enough to lay the rockets out as they are assembled. They are then moved out for launch on some form of dolly system. It would be very easy to ship this to a new building in Portugal or maybe build something in the Azores. (That’s what SpaceX did at Vandenberg.)