The honest version,
including the bits
we are losing
Aerospace has a habit of publishing a green report with a photograph of a wildflower meadow. This page gives the numbers we measure, the targets we have committed to, and the three areas where we are behind.
Our reporting follows the GHG Protocol and is verified annually by an external assessor. The underlying data is available to customers who ask, including the parts that are estimates rather than measurements — roughly a third of scope 3.
Test stands and
titanium
Two things dominate our footprint: the energy used at Westcott and Rotherham, and the embodied carbon in the metal we buy. Everything else is rounding.
Energy
All sites on certified renewable supply since 2022. Rotherham's compressed air system was rebuilt in 2024 and cut site consumption by 19 %, which was both the cheapest and the least interesting improvement we made.
Scope 2 — 71 % reduction since 2019
Test operations
Hot-fire testing burns propellant and there is no way around that. What we can control is how many times we run. Better instrumentation and model correlation have cut the average qualification campaign from 61 runs to 44 since 2021.
Scope 1 — 12 % reduction, flat since 2024
Materials
Titanium and aluminium account for about 44 % of our scope 3. We now buy 61 % of aluminium as recycled-content stock and are qualifying a lower-carbon titanium route, which will take until 2028 because qualification always does.
Scope 3 — the hard one
What we put up there
has to come down
Every HALYARD platform is designed to meet a five-year post-mission disposal rule, not the twenty-five-year rule it is legally allowed to use. On a 700 km orbit that means carrying propellant we would rather have sold as payload capacity.
- Passivation of all stored energy at end of life, verified in the flight software
- Casualty risk on re-entry below 1 in 10,000 for every platform we have flown
- Conjunction screening and manoeuvre capability on all propulsive platforms
- Design-for-demise research aimed at the two components that usually survive
- No deliberate release of mission-related objects, including separation debris
Three things
we are behind on
Published because a sustainability page without failures is a marketing document. These are reviewed at board level every quarter.
Flights rose 22 % last year, driven by launch campaign support and two export programmes. We committed to a 30 % reduction by 2027 and we are currently going the wrong way. The honest answer is that we have not been willing to send fewer engineers to a first flight, and we are not sure we should be.
Thirty-nine per cent of our scope 3 is still spend-based estimation rather than supplier data. Small suppliers, quite reasonably, do not have the resource to produce it. We are funding a shared reporting tool for our twenty largest, which will help with about half the gap.
Scope 1 has been flat for two years because test volume rose with the order book. Reducing runs per campaign has cancelled out growth rather than beaten it. We do not currently have a credible plan to get this down without testing less, which is not a trade we will make.
Local, deliberately
Sixty-eight per cent of employees live within fifteen miles of the site they work at. That is partly luck and partly where we chose to build.
Apprenticeships
Fourteen apprentices a year across machining, harness assembly and test. Retention four years after completion is 81 %.
Schools work
Engineers spend a paid day a term with local schools and colleges. Eleven of our current apprentices first came through the door on one of those visits.
Supply chain
Fifty-two per cent of supplier spend is with UK companies, and we pay small suppliers within fourteen days as a matter of policy rather than negotiation.
Ask for the data
behind these numbers
Published each July, verified externally, and it includes the methodology notes rather than hiding them.