Last week’s poll: the UK’s Scottish spaceport plan

The prospect of UK spaceports is far from new but last week business secretary Greg Clark gave a firm indication that plans are being converted into policy.

Clark used Farnborough International Airshow 2018 to announce a £50m UK space launch fund, some of which will be steered toward the UK’s first spaceport on the A’Mhoine peninsula in Sutherland, on Scotland’s north coast.

Farnborough was the setting four years ago for the announcement of eight sites seen as suitable for spaceport development, with six of these being north of the border.

Now that the countdown has begun to build a UK spaceport, we asked if Sutherland – described on these pages as a ‘boggy peninsula’ – is the right place for vertical launches, and whether a horizontal launch site would have been a better option given the advanced state of development of Virgin Galactic’s Launcher One system, and the possibility of the UK spaceplane Skylon. Similarly, does the current absence of a UK-made and operated vertical launch technology increase Britain’s reliance on overseas launch operators?