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Scotland: the land of mist and mountains long associated with kilts, bagpipes, haggis ... and now space launches. Timed to coincide with the Queen's Speech to Parliament, British startup Orbex announced that it will build a new 2,000 m² (21,500 ft²) rocket production facility in Scotland and is scouting for a launch site on the north coast of the country to send small payloads into low Earth orbit.
The announcement comes on the tails of Orbex making a private presentation of its launch technology to potential investors at the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget Airport. It already has a 1,200 m² (12,900 ft²) factory in England, where it is building launch vehicle subsystems, and is now seeking to expand north of the border for the assembly and launching of the completed rocket.
The goal is to create a booster that can lift payloads of up to 150 kg (330 lb) into low Earth orbit (LEO) and, eventually, to send up payloads of up to 220 kg (485 lb) into LEO, polar, or sun-synchronous orbits at altitudes of up to 1,250 km (775 mi). To help achieve this, Orbex is working with regional and national agencies to draft detailed development proposals in line with the UK government's 2017 Spaceflight Bill intended to promote launch sites in the British Isles.
The inaugural rocket will carry the tartan of which clan?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ese002 on Tuesday June 27 2017, @09:55PM (2 children)
Unless you are going for a polar orbit, Scotland is a pretty terrible place to launch. Too far from the equator to get much of a rotational boost. Energy conserving Eastern trajectory covers heavily populated regions, some of which are a little jumpy about rockets headed their direction.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 28 2017, @12:57PM (1 child)
How much of a boost do you really get though? Equatorial groundspeed is 1180km/hr or ~0.33km/s, versus a Low Earth Orbit speed of ~7.5km/s, so you're talking about a contribution of 0.33^2/7.5^2 = 0.2% of the total kinetic energy. Granted that translates into a larger percentage loss of payload due to rocket non-linearities, but in an age where rockets routinely launch with far less than maximum payload that's not so important.
As for a bias towards polar orbits, or at least tilted ones, well that's exactly what you need to best serve high latitudes, isn't it? Equatorial orbits aren't much use for anyone hidden from them beyond the curve of the Earth. Besides, your orbital path is mostly much decided after you're in vacuum - equatorial launches routinely end in highly-inclined orbits, and there's no reason the opposite can't hold just as true.
Now, folks being touchy about overhead launches might be a bit bigger issue. But Russia is over 1000 miles to the east, plenty of time for the flight path to be fairly well resolved. And heck, they might even enter the market for counter-rotating satellites and launch to the west - after all they don't have all that equatorial groundspeed working against them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 28 2017, @01:40PM
Rockets are about delta-v not energy. You can get a significantly higher payload with that small velocity boost. Keep in mind that you're not just increasing the velocity of your payload, but also the velocity of the entire, fully fueled rocket at launch, which is typically 30 to 50 times the mass of the payload! So that 0.2% is more like 6-10% of the total kinetic energy of the payload in orbit.