One-time banker who’s turning dreams of outer space into an Australian reality

Adam Gilmour is Australia’s own rocket man – turning his back on a successful banking career to pursue a dream of space travel.

Inside Gilmour Space on the Gold Coast, where Australia’s first large rockets are being built.

Before becoming a rocket builder, Adam Gilmour was a banker who dreamt of space travel and thought humans would be living on the moon long before now.

What motivated him to try to turn his dreams into a reality was money or, more precisely, the appeal of turning a big investment into something much larger.

It was 2004 and a $10m prize was on offer for whoever could build a rocket ship capable of taking at least three people to the edge of space and back, more than once.

With the backing of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, a company called Space Composites won the challenge and Gilmour was sold.

“The banker in me saw that Richard Branson went in and said ‘I want to exclusively licence the technology’ and he started Virgin Galactic,” says Gilmour.

“Then he immediately raised $300m at a $1bn valuation. So a $20m investment, a successful demonstration of technology became a $1bn valuation. I wanted a piece of that, and that was really the spark.”

Gold Coast-based Gilmour Space Technology co-founders Adam and James Gilmour.

The next 10 years were spent figuring out how he was going to do it, reading space technology journals avidly and building up his knowledge.

By 2016, Gilmour had left Citibank and was setting up Gilmour Space with wife Michelle and brother Adam, with the ambition of building rockets large enough to send satellites into orbit, and eventually humans.

“We’ve got to go step by step and I don’t think we’re going to get billions of dollars of funding from the government like America does so we’re going to have to generate enough revenue to sustain our research and development,” he says.

Fast forward to 2022, and Gilmour Space on the Gold Coast has 170 highly skilled employees. It has attracted $87m from investors and perhaps most impressively, orders for rockets and satellites.

“The good thing is rockets are like aircraft – people buy them well ahead of the production schedule – so we can sell a rocket two years before we launch the rocket,” he says.

“We’ve sold basically two rockets already before we’ve even finished building them.”

To say it’s been a long process of trial and error is an understatement, with Gilmour happy to admit the failures have outnumbered the successes to date.

But as a subscriber to the Elon Musk philosophy of “fail fast, learn quickly, test again”, Gilmour says they will achieve their goal, and at a much cheaper price than most space companies.

Test firing of a rocket engine.

While the ballpark figure for a rocket launch vehicle is around $100m, Gilmour Space is aiming to do it for under $20m.

“If you look at how much money (Musk) has spent developing his space launch vehicles and you compare it to other America or European rocket companies, he’s literally 10 times cheaper in development costs because of the methodology,” Gilmour says.

“I’m not as crazy as he is. I’m not going to buy Twitter or make comments about Ukraine or anything like that, but I think he’s a fantastic tech entrepreneur.”

Gilmour even employs Musk’s former director of spacecraft production, Nick Lindsay, within his team of “rocket engineers”, many of whom are from unrelated industries. “The reality is if I went and advertised for a rocket engineer who had five years’ experience with liquid rocket engines, there’s nobody there,” he says. “So you have to advertise for somebody who has an adjacent skill set. People can pick it up pretty quickly.”

Providing the next test launch goes to plan in late March, Gilmour says there is almost limitless potential for his company — with satellite launches, space tourism and even asteroid mining in his sights. “I love the John F Kennedy quote that ‘we go to the moon not because it’s easy but because it’s hard’,” he says.

“We build rockets because they’re hard and I often say that to the team. It’s one of the hardest thing humanity has ever done, to build a rocket that goes to space.

“There’s only 10 nations on the planet that have ever done it and they’ve done it with billions of dollars, we’re doing it for less than $100m. It’s a game changer.”