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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: 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.