You wait decades for a spaceport and then two come along at once. That was the scene at the Farnborough International Airshow today, where the UK Space Agency revealed plans to fund the establishment of a rocket launchpad on the bleak, boggy A鈥橫hoine peninsula in Sutherland on Scotland鈥檚 northern coast.
In addition, the UKSA is also backing plans to fly satellite-launching rockets strapped to aircraft taking off from a former Royal Air Force base near Newquay, in the west of England.
The government says it hopes to give companies and universities building small satellites in the UK the option of launching their spacecraft on home turf, rather than having to ship them abroad to be flown as 鈥渟econdary payloads鈥� on larger missions.
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We have lift-off
To do this, the UKSA is funding facilities for both conventional, vertically-launched rockets also rockets released from an aircraft at high altitude 鈥� so-called horizontal launch.
The UKSA has awarded US-based aerospace contractor Lockheed Martin 拢23.5 million the A鈥橫hoine launch pad. Lockheed expects to fly a version of the Rocket Lab Electron rocket, which only flew for the first time this year, as it has a stake in the company.
Orbex, a spaceflight startup based in Reading, UK, has also been awarded 拢5.5 million to develop a new breed of hyper-efficient rocket for launch from the peninsula.
Planning permission to develop the marshy A鈥橫hoine site will be filed in late 2019, says Roy Kirk of local trade body Highlands and Islands Enterprise, which is coordinating the work, with building expected in 2020 and launches, potentially, as soon as 2021. The site, in an uninhabited area, is currently hard to reach so a 4-kilometre road will also need to be built, he says.
On the horizontal launch front, Virgin Orbit of Mojave, California is planning to launch small satellites from the UK using its two-stage LauncherOne rocket, which it will release from a Boeing 747-400 at 35,000 feet.
At Farnborough, Virgin Orbit struck a deal with Spaceport Cornwall 鈥� a space business at Newquay airport, the former RAF base 鈥� to run its UK satellite-launching service. Virgin plans its first launches within the next three years.
Getting to orbit from the UK may not all be plain sailing. As American companies, Lockheed Martin, Rocketlab and Virgin Orbit will all have to satisfy the US Department of State that they are not breaching US International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which place restrictions on exporting rocket technology. 鈥淭here could be ITAR issues or restrictions to overcome,鈥� says Nik Smith of Lockheed Martin.
However, Will Pomerantz of Virgin Orbit says ITAR hurdles shouldn鈥檛 be too much of a problem thanks to a there being a key precedent: , US-based Orbital Sciences flew its air-dropped Pegasus satellite launching rocket from Spain without any issues.
