A company in Thailand is rewriting Southeast Asia's path to orbit.

Southeast Asia is filling its skies with satellites. The region builds and operates more of its own every year — for farming, disaster response, connectivity, defence — and it's one of the fastest-growing satellite markets in the world. But it can't launch a single one of them. Every ride to orbit is rented from a foreign rocket. That gap — real, growing demand with no local supply — is the opening one company in Thailand is built to fill.

Simon Gwozdz built his first rocket with about $5,000. He has no engineering degree — he taught himself propulsion and orbital mechanics by reading — and he went a year without pay to keep his company, Equatorial Space, alive. Nine years on, the most interesting thing about Equatorial isn't the founder's story. It's the rocket architecture itself.

Most rockets run on one of two unpleasant options: solid motors that, once lit, are "essentially a giant firework" and can't be switched off, or liquid engines that are powerful but complex and volatile.

Equatorial's choice is a hybrid — a solid fuel and a liquid oxidiser kept apart until you want thrust — which means it physically cannot mix and explode, and its HRF-1 solid fuel composition gets this promising technology up to the speed needed in space launch applications.

That one property cascades: it's roughly a tenth of the cost of conventional systems, about 45% cleaner, and safe enough to ship as ordinary cargo rather than hazardous material. As Simon recalls, several batches have been made in Singapore — a notoriously strict environment for energetics — and the composition is patent-pending. In an industry where propulsion is usually the most dangerous, most expensive, most regulated part of the stack, efficient propellant that you can put in a normal shipping container is not a small claim.

And it isn't a claim on paper. In December 2020, Equatorial flew it. Their Low Altitude Demonstrator — 2.4 metres, 22 kilograms — lifted off from a Felcra palm-oil estate in Perak, Malaysia, and climbed to 1.2 kilometres: the first commercially developed hybrid-rocket flight in Southeast Asia, done on a shoestring with Malaysian university partners (UiTM and USM). The fuel didn't just pass ground tests — it flew. In a sector where the first question anyone serious asks is "has it flown?", that's the asset.

The reason the fuel matters is economics. A dedicated science flight — the kind a researcher needs for a few minutes of microgravity — runs $1.5 to $3.5 million in the West, which has kept that access to rich agencies. Equatorial's thesis is to cut that by around 90%, putting a real experiment within reach of a university lab, a student, or a smaller nation that could never afford a seat, even if just for a minutes-long suborbital ride. And they're chasing it lean: about 25 people and roughly $5.5 million raised — a fraction of what launch ventures elsewhere spend just to reach the pad. Launch is one of the hardest, most capital-hungry things in tech, so doing this much on this little is its own kind of signal.

The people who'd know have started to bet on them. In June, Thailand's Board of Investment named Equatorial its first officially approved space launch service provider — an investment green light, part of a national spaceport push led by the Thai space agency, GISTDA. It's not a flight licence, and Thailand's space law is still working its way through the system. But it's a government formally putting a private launch company at the front of its plans — validation that's rare anywhere in the region.

Which is why the last few weeks stung. Equatorial became the first commercial entity to attempt a private rocket launch from Thai soil — its Mid Altitude Demonstrator, meant to test key systems for the suborbital and orbital vehicles to come. The attempt was called off. Crucially, not because of the rocket: defects were found in the launch tower — the ground infrastructure — that couldn't be fixed on site inside the cleared window. By Simon's own account, the team worked through brutal conditions and "got remarkably close," and walked away having trailblazed the regulatory path for commercial launch in Thailand, hardware intact. They will fly it. When, they aren't saying yet.

That's the state of Equatorial: a proven fuel, a government behind it, and a setback that landed on the tower, not the rocket. The promise is specific — not a moonshot, but a cheap, safe, shippable way up, built by people who've already lit the thing once. The rocket's ready when the pad is. In this industry, that's the hard part done.

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If you missed the last issue, go back and read it: good science isn't enough. A top deep-tech VC lays out the exact machine a country needs to turn its research into companies.

Cheers!

— shirley