Billionaire-backed companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit have been revolutionising the space industry over the last decade, which has seen advances in re-usable rockets, the deployment of thousands of small communication satellites and new launch sites opened. To find out how smaller U.K.-based firms are looking to compete, CNBC visited a spaceport being built in the far north of the Shetland Islands, an established satellite-builder and a start-up aiming to see one of its re-usable satellites finally make it into space. .