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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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Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
(Score: 2) by subs on Tuesday February 21 2017, @07:35PM
like their ISS
Yes, of course, but you gotta remember, that non-equatorial AND non-polar orbits have relatively little use in the commercial space, except for a few very specialty applications. "Mir" was placed there simply because it was convenient for them and Mir was hardly a commercial venture.
You can reach any inclination from any spot on the earth if you're willing to burn extra propellant
Yeah, and that last part is the problem. IF you have the propellant, then sure. But it also severely limits your launch capability and can increase vehicle cost and complexity.
in that the Russians don't launch at 51 degrees but considerably further south however they have to launch into 51 degrees and waste some propellant in order to avoid overflying China
Yeah, it was one of the design constraints for the ISS orbital parameters, in that 51.6 was pretty much the southernmost LEO that the Russians could hit. The Americans would have preferred the ISS to be a lot lower. The problem for Scotland is that there's pretty much nothing you can do to avoid Norway & Sweden this way, so the lowest you could hit would be around 70, which is just silly at this point. That's getting so impractical that you'd have to carry a whole extra stage just to do the inclination correction at an extremely high apogee bi-elliptic transfer. That means designing an extra upper stage designed for deep space maneuvers. I mean we're talking easily an extra 2-3 km/s of delta-v and that's pretty extreme.
one way to avoid stupid export laws is to launch locally
Yeah, which is why I suspect the primary use of this launch site would be military.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday February 21 2017, @08:42PM
The problem for Scotland is that there's pretty much nothing you can do to avoid Norway & Sweden this way
LOL Sweden, they don't do self defense of their borders, just launch over them anyway. Somewhat more politely, they have a lot of rural land and no nukes to shoot back at the UK in some kind of "MAD mistake" so just go for it.
Eventually having a spacex first stage fly overhead will be about as worrisome as having a Boeing 777 fly overhead. Technically it could fall out of the sky and land on your head, but they never do that, and when it gets to that point the Swedes really have nothing to complain about.
I wonder if there is more to the secret sauce, with extremely high precision GPS I wonder if you could plot a course and guarantee to the Swedes that no matter what happens if the flight goes dumb ballistic at any millisecond, its guaranteed to only hit farmland or uninhabited areas. I believe that might be possible with very large controller storage and relying on maneuvering jets and playing games with coming in side first (high drag) or pointy end first (low drag). I believe it might be possible to guarantee flightplan and abort control system such that you'd need more than 3 separate system failures before anything landed anywhere but ocean or uninhabited land. At that point I think they would be chill unless you're lofting nuclear reactors or whatever.
(Score: 2) by subs on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:54AM
Sweden, they don't do self defense of their borders, just launch over them anyway
Both the UK and Sweden are members of several tightly knit organizations, which do take this kind of stuff pretty seriously.
Eventually having a spacex first stage fly overhead will be about as worrisome as having a Boeing 777 fly overhead
Commercial aircraft don't have a more than 1% of doing this: https://youtu.be/WTVkhp0MxMc?t=2m26s [youtu.be]
I wonder if there is more to the secret sauce, with extremely high precision GPS I wonder if you could plot a course and guarantee to the Swedes that no matter what happens if the flight goes dumb ballistic at any millisecond, its guaranteed to only hit farmland or uninhabited areas
No, there isn't. There's no straight ~1000km-long path eastward that guarantees you can't hit inhabited areas.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @02:59PM
There's no straight ~1000km-long path eastward that guarantees you can't hit inhabited areas.
Well yeah, that's exactly what I mean by an actively navigated extremely high resolution, so a 1 m/s correction at launch means you miss Stockholm rather than going directly overhead, combined with a zillion other corrections... lets say a 5% fuel cost is acceptable, or more likely possible... Sort of a think outside the box solution.
(Score: 2) by subs on Wednesday February 22 2017, @10:54PM
Sort of a think outside the box solution
See linked video of SpaceX RUD mid-flight. After this, all your solutions go out the window and the debris simply follows a ballistic trajectory with chaotic atmospheric perturbations and a fairly wide dispersion pattern.