The Sky Road
July 17, 2018 2:57 AM   Subscribe

The UK has announced it will be building its first spaceport on Scotland's northern coast.
posted by fearfulsymmetry (28 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best comment on the report in The Independent:
The Scottish location is convenient to Scrabster and the ferry to Orkney Islands.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:04 AM on July 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


Won't it be more expensive to launch rockets from there, due to its distance from the equator?
posted by dng at 3:12 AM on July 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


They’re building a launch pad on a peat bog?

Bring some marshmallows.
posted by Sys Rq at 3:16 AM on July 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


In Snowdonia, Llanbedr is fuming at missing out. Apart from anything else, launching rockets off the top of Snowdon means they don't have so far to go.
posted by Prince Lazy I at 3:22 AM on July 17, 2018


Won't it be more expensive to launch rockets from there, due to its distance from the equator?

That'll depend on the target orbit. It's not good for, say geostationary, but it's grand for inclined eccentric orbits.
posted by Dysk at 3:22 AM on July 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


(And anywhere should be equally good for polar orbits, for example. It isn't quite as simple as equator good, elsewhere bad.)
posted by Dysk at 3:24 AM on July 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


I don’t understand the ‘northernmost possible’ location either. Nice to visit, though; I was up there just the other week, and I recommend the Tongue Hotel.
posted by Segundus at 3:27 AM on July 17, 2018


One of the main considerations for launchpad locations is typically safety. That is to say, you want the area to be fairly sparsely populated at best in case your launch vehicle goes pop or falls out of the sky early in the launch. You also want the first chunk of flight path to be clear of people for the same reason - your launch vehicle decides to call it quits a few minutes in, you don't want that to be when it's over a city. These are probably the major considerations that led to the remote location.

(And indeed, the BBC article makes a brief mention of there being a straight run over ocean to the north pole, neatly dodging the Faroes and northern Norway, but it's far from prominent)
posted by Dysk at 3:37 AM on July 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Rocket men: locals divided over plans for UK's first spaceport

Headline writers: you do not need to do this
posted by thelonius at 3:41 AM on July 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


Safety is a good idea... I mean Faslane with it's nuclear armed subs is nearly 60 miles from Glasgow
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:45 AM on July 17, 2018


Very nice Ken Macleod title.
posted by doctornemo at 3:46 AM on July 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


The way things are going, when it's built, I think there's a v good chance they'll be saltires on the side of the rockets not union flags.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:47 AM on July 17, 2018 [8 favorites]


Safety is a good idea... I mean Faslane with it's nuclear armed subs is nearly 60 miles from Glasgow

Pretty sure protocol would strongly discourage launching from Faslane itself.
posted by Dysk at 3:52 AM on July 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


Won't it be more expensive to launch rockets from there, due to its distance from the equator?

No, the north coast of Scotland is one of the better places in Europe to launch a rocket, at least for a particular type of mission.

Satellites that have sensors like cameras or radars tend to launch into a special orbit called Sun-Synchronous. It has the very useful property that the plane of the orbit remains fixed with respect to the sun, so you can arrange a camera satellite to always see the ground with the sunlight coming in at a consistently good angle, or you can make your orbit travel around the solar terminator where it will always have sunlight for its solar arrays. Sun-Synchronous orbits are so useful that there's a fair business for rockets that can do this mission.

To get to this orbit efficiently, you need to launch in the direction of (nearly) north or south, and preferably have no-one living below your launch path, as people can get oddly annoyed when a bit of a failed booster falls through their roof. The north coast of Scotland has a trajectory that's perfect for sun-synchronous launches and passes over the artic and across oceans without encountering inhabited land. It also helps to have not much population around the launch site where being in the Scottish highlands probably helps.

There is genuinely a lot of money to be had in this industry, small satellite launches are a boom area at the moment, so I wouldn't be too cynical about the prospects of this project. From the link above, the UK Space Agency has already made contracts for £31 million or so in initial development, with is not to be sneezed at.
posted by Eleven at 3:59 AM on July 17, 2018 [24 favorites]


I remember the Tories in the Scottish parliament sneering when the Scotish Nationalist brought up Scottish space ambitions... but Glasgow already makes more satellites than any other city in Europe... it's already got a space industry.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:19 AM on July 17, 2018 [7 favorites]


There could also be horizontal launch sites in Prestwick, Newquay, Campbeltown and Llanbedr
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:23 AM on July 17, 2018


+1 for the Ken Macleod reference, and all hail our Scottish Space Socialist overlords!

Yes, as Eleven has pointed out, if you are going into a sun-synchronous or polar orbit, you want to be as far north as possible to minimise any expensive (in fuel, and therefore money terms) orbital plane-change manoeuvres.
posted by adrianhon at 4:39 AM on July 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


As long as you aren't literally on the north (or south) pole you shouldn't need a plane change for a sun-synchronous orbit? It's just the Coriolis effect being stronger closer to the equator that makes far-north (or far-south) launches more efficient for polar or sun-synchronous orbits if I understand it correctly. (But I very well may not, and I welcome corrections!)
posted by Dysk at 4:50 AM on July 17, 2018


Actually you may be right Dysk. I think the effect of the Earth’s rotation is not as important as I imagined.
posted by adrianhon at 5:29 AM on July 17, 2018


The Coriolis effect involves rotation relative to some point on the horizontal surface of the earth, and doesn't do much of anything to the orbital trajectory of a rocket not in contact with that surface aside from maybe influencing wind directions depending on the weather. The eastward momentum imparted to a launched rocket by the rotation of the entire earth is related only in that it's also caused by the rotation of the earth. In practice you'd want to be as far north as possible I guess, but sun-synchronous orbits can't be exactly polar so being literally on the geographic north pole wouldn't be quite ideal, plus you'd probably have about six countries claiming you were launching from their territory.
posted by sfenders at 5:37 AM on July 17, 2018


One of the main considerations for launchpad locations is typically safety. That is to say, you want the area to be fairly sparsely populated at best in case your launch vehicle goes pop or falls out of the sky early in the launch.

Fun fact: This is why we used to launch our rockets from Woomera in Australia. The original plan was to have a space port somewhere in Norfolk. But then someone pointed out that rocket crash + north sea oil rig was probably a bit of a bad combination.

Also worth pointing out that a lot of this is being reported as if we've never had a space programme before, which is just patently untrue. Not only have we long been a major player in the satellite and rover markets, but we are also a member of the small-but-exclusive club of nations (10 in total) to independently achieve space flight. We did it all the way back in 1971.

We just happen to be the only nation so far to abandon that capacity too.

Prospero is still up there, lonely, beeping away...

Self-link, but it got FPPed before so should be alright I think.
posted by garius at 5:50 AM on July 17, 2018 [6 favorites]


I don’t understand the ‘northernmost possible’ location.

North is up.
Space is up.

So more north = closer to space.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 7:16 AM on July 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


James Bond approves.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:26 AM on July 17, 2018


See also the New Zealand launch site at 39°S. I mean that's no 58°N like here in Scotland, but it's a long way off the equator.
posted by Nelson at 7:30 AM on July 17, 2018


Apparently the UK moved from the idea of picking one site to develop to a licencing approach, so the others can develop if they can fund. Newquay announced a deal with Virgin Orbit yesterday to do horizontal take-offs from 2021.
posted by biffa at 7:33 AM on July 17, 2018


See also the New Zealand launch site at 39°S. I mean that's no 58°N like here in Scotland, but it's a long way off the equator.
As a curiosity, the ISS is at 51°, so it's possible to launch to Station from NZ, but not from Scotland.

There aren't many interesting orbits that you can get to from Mahia that you can't get to from A'Mhoine. As mentioned above, both are good for polar and sun-sync, and pretty useless for GTO/GEO/anything equatorial/planetary. Scotland might be good for Molniya I guess which, at a glance, it looks like Mahia isn't.

Seems like the North Sea weather would be an issue, but I guess someone's done the site assessment...
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 11:24 AM on July 17, 2018


Rocket men: locals divided over plans for UK's first spaceport
Headline writers: you do not need to do this


No kidding, you can't shoehorn that into the Elton John lyrics, like, at all.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:54 PM on July 17, 2018


Now I've just spent the last five minutes trying to rewrite the headline so that it does scan. I'm bad at this kind of thing, and I'm sure someone can improve on:

Rocket man: UK first launchpad splits local views
posted by Dysk at 4:55 AM on July 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


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