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The Belfast Telegraph reports on the Spaceflight Bill, proposed legislation that is to be put before Parliament this week.
The government issued a statement on the proposed legislation. According to the statement, Britain could build space-ports on its own territory "by 2020."
Whether the launch facilities would be on the home islands, in the British Overseas Territories (which include islands in the Caribbean such as Montserrat), or both was unclear to the submitter.
[What, if any, advantages are there for launching from Britain vs a location in the Caribbean? -Ed.]
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Space Launches from British Territory to be Proposed
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Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Tuesday February 21 2017, @01:37PM
A slightly more informative video is available on the BBC [bbc.co.uk].
Basically, they're looking at conventional airports in the UK that can host horizontal takeoff technologies - satellite launchers dropped from planes, Virgin Galactic-style fairground rides etc. I think the favourites are the smaller airports (in areas that need development) that have full-sized runways - often former military bases. Newquay in Cornwall was another one on the list.
[What, if any, advantages are there for launching from Britain vs a location in the Caribbean? -Ed.]
Problem is, there aren't many open air swimming pools (or hinge-based palm trees) [wikipedia.org] in rainy Britain, so where are you going to hide your launchpad?
...but seriously, the UK mainland is a bit too densely populated to fire off conventional rockets willy nilly without rattling a lot of windows, and people are touchy about despoiling the few isolated places, whether its greens protesting about endangered great crested newts or the nobs complaining about disturbing the grouse out of hunting season. Plus, I guess you generally want to launch to the East which means that Northern Europe becomes your emergency abort zone... (c.f. say, Florida, where the Atlantic catches your mistakes).
If you're dropping the rocket from a Jumbo Jet, though, I guess you can take off from the UK and fly to an acceptably ocean-bound point on the equator before lighting the blue touch paper and retiring.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 21 2017, @02:58PM
Yes, the population of Britain is most certainly dense, but less so than, say, Ireland.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mrchew1982 on Tuesday February 21 2017, @04:24PM
I said this above, but it probably won't show up, so I'll put it here too:
equatorial launches (travelling around the world west to east or geostationary) are usually used for communication satellites. If they're going to be launching spy satellites (which would be my guess because there's no other reason to want complete control of the launch facility, commercial launches are just too cheap to justify the expenses...) chances are they'll launch into a polar orbit (north to south over the poles of the earth) because they get to spy on more places on the earth that way.
Cant launch north because that makes Russia crazy (ICBMs would take that path) So they'll probably launch from the south to the south, although they'd have to use an island to the west or end up flying the rocket over Portugal and maybe Spain. An air based launcher would make this easy.
(Score: 2) by subs on Wednesday February 22 2017, @11:03AM
Cant launch north because that makes Russia crazy (ICBMs would take that path)
Yes they could and no ICBMs wouldn't take that path to attack Russia. This is the UK, not America. To launch at Russia from the UK, you'd be launching almost exactly due east. Launching north-northwest from the UK would be launching towards Canada and Alaska. It's also no problem letting all interested parties know before you launch that it's a non-ICBM launch, so they can chill.