A company that started
with one lathe and
a bad idea
Anders Fisker left a large engine manufacturer in 2008 with a plan to build a better turbopump seal. The seal was a commercial failure. The test rig he built to prove it, however, turned out to be the only one of its kind in the south west, and people started paying to use it.
Sixteen years later there are 1,240 of us across six sites, and the business still runs on the same principle: own the equipment, employ the people who understand it, and let the work come to you. We have never taken outside investment, which explains both the pace and the buildings.
Sixteen years,
abbreviated
The years nobody puts in a company history are 2012 and 2020. Both are here because they mattered more than the good ones.
-
2009
Fisker Engineering Ltd. registered
Three people in a rented unit off Gipsy Patch Lane, Filton. First invoice was for £4,180 of seal testing.
-
2012
Nearly the end of it
A launch customer went into administration owing us eleven months of work. The company survived by selling the original test rig and taking on subcontract machining for two years. Everyone took a pay cut, including the founder, who took the largest.
-
2013
First flight hardware
A set of feed system components for a European upper stage. Twelve parts, all of which flew, none of which we were allowed to talk about for six years.
-
2016
Filton site and the name change
Moved into Ridgeway Park and became Fisker Aerospace. Headcount passed 200. First clean room commissioned in November.
-
2017
Farnborough and the defence business
A requalified spacecraft power unit found a second life on an uncrewed platform, and the LONGSHORE line started almost by accident.
-
2019
SKUA-4 qualified
Our first fully in-house propulsion product. Also the year the RIPTIDE research programme started, funded out of profit.
-
2020
The bad year, well handled
No redundancies. Two sites shut for eleven weeks, the propulsion team kept a skeleton test crew going, and we used the gap to finish the qualification paperwork that had been sliding for two years.
-
2022
HALYARD-400 first flight
Launched in March, commissioned in nine days, still operating. Rotherham acquired the same summer.
-
2024
FULMAR-2 qualification complete
2,142 seconds of hot-fire across three qualification models, and the first UK-built 45 kN restartable upper-stage engine to complete a full campaign in a decade.
-
2026
Westcott bay 3 rebuilt
A £6.2m rebuild takes the site to 60 kN. Headcount at 1,240, turnover at £186m, and still no external shareholders.
Four things we argue
about internally
These are not values on a poster. They are the four arguments that come up most often in design reviews, and the side we usually land on.
When an analyst and a technician disagree, we book the chamber. It is more expensive than the argument and cheaper than being wrong on orbit. Around a fifth of our test budget exists purely to settle internal disagreements.
We buy capability rather than capacity. If a process is on the critical path of something we sell, it should be in one of our buildings, operated by someone on our payroll. It makes us slower to start and much faster to recover.
Anomalies are reported to the customer within one working day, before we know the cause. Nobody enjoys that call. It has never once cost us a contract, and twice it has won us one.
We cap growth at roughly 18 % headcount a year, because beyond that the apprentices and graduates stop getting properly supervised. We have turned down work over this, and had that argument with a customer more than once.
We are not trying to be a big company. We are trying to be a company that is still here in 2050, employing people in Bristol who make things you can hold.