THE GREAT BRITISH BLAST-OFF

The site has been chosen and building will soon begin on what will become Britain’s first spaceport

- DR STUART CLARK

If you were asked to think of the ideal site for launching rockets into space, chances are your first thought would be of Cape Canaveral in Florida, where NASA’s famous moon-shots began their epic journeys. Or possibly the similarly historic Russian site in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, where the launch of the world’s first artificial satellite Sputnik 1 kick-started the space race, and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin blasted off to become the first human being in space. But chances are that Sutherland, a remote, rural county on the coast of northern Scotland, would be pretty far from your mind. But that is exactly the spot that the UK Space Agency (UKSA) has chosen to build the UK’s first vertical-launch spaceport. Look beyond first impressions, however, and it turns out Northern Scotland is actually a near-perfect location to build a spaceport. And being in the north it is ideally placed for launching satellites into polar orbit – an increasingly popular practice, as this allows satellites to synchronise their orbits with the sun, so that the amount of shadows in any images they take are significantly reduced. Also, the Sutherland site has the added benefit that any rockets launched there would be able to fly straight over the sea, rather than overpopulated areas where they may potentially cause problems.