Could RAF St. Mawgan be a spaceport? (Image: Janusz Konarski/Alamy)

Build it and they will come. That was the message from the UK Space Agency today as it revealed ambitious plans to build a spaceport somewhere in the UK before 2018. However, no commercial space company has yet demonstrated a spaceplane that is capable of carrying paying passengers.

The plan is to build a spaceport at a remote site where regular airline traffic is low. The location also has to have a longer-than usual runway or room to build one. This is because after a hypersonic re-entry, spaceplanes will still be travelling at far greater speeds than standard planes and will need more room to land.

Such requirements make either the north or north-east of Scotland a sensible location, away from the busy transatlantic air corridors. Cornwall in the UK’s deep south-west is also a possibility, where likely sites may include RAF St Mawgan, near Newquay, which is already used for rocket engine testing. In all, eight sites have been shortlisted by the UK Space Agency and will be announced at Farnborough Air Show by the science minister David Willets tomorrow.


The focus on Scotland as a site for a UK spaceport comes ahead of September’s independence referendum. If Scotland votes for independence it would lose the chance to host these spaceports and would have to bid for its own.

The place for space

“The UK space industry is one of our great success stories and I am sure there will be a role for Scotland to play in the future,” Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said.

The decision to build a spaceport follows a two-year government review looking at the job-creating potential of commercial spaceflight. It concluded that a spaceport would be an essential hub for a host of space-related markets, from tourism to satellite launches, offering many employment opportunities.

In a brief statement released ahead of tomorrow’s announcement of potential sites, the UK Space Agency says: “A spaceport would open up the UK space tourism industry to specialist operators such as Virgin Galactic and XCor, but it also paves the way for future technologies that will help make Britain the place for space.”

Virgin Galactic and XCor are working on spaceplanes – orbital vehicles that land like regular planes. Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo is a “captive carry” design lofted to an altitude of 10 kilometres by a jet plane, from where it fires its rocket motor and heads for suborbit. Flight tests are ongoing. Xcor’s Lynx is a rocket plane that flies from the runway to space with no carrier aircraft – but it has yet to fly.

Being able to service such spacecraft with a British spaceport is crucial, says the UK Space Agency. “It will be the first spaceport of its kind outside the United States.”

Rocket science

Other companies in the industry are impressed. “It’s great to see the UK establishing itself in the human spaceflight arena. Nations that ignore new opportunities developing in both suborbital and orbital space transportation run the risk of being left behind,” says Mike Gold, head of operations at Bigelow Aerospace, a maker of expandable space habitats.

Moves in the US underscore the economic importance of spaceports: commercial rocket maker SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, has this week moved a step closer to getting permission to build its first all-commercial spaceport in Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX already launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, plus similar facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but it needs more launch capacity to service its bulging backlog of rocket launch orders.

On 9 July, the US Federal Aviation Administration completed an extensive environmental audit of the impact of the proposed launch complex – and gave SpaceX the go-ahead for it. Such audits are not trivial: they are a serious, gruelling business that can cause a proposal to be reject for a number of reasons. For instance, an airport’s application to the FAA to host future Xcor launches has been stymied by worries that sonic booms from rocket motors might interfere with the mating rituals of prairie chickens.

So SpaceX is not counting its chickens yet. “Brownsville remains a finalist for SpaceX’s development of a commercial orbital launch complex,” says Hannah Post of SpaceX. “But there remain several criteria that will need to be met before SpaceX makes a decision. We are hopeful that these will be complete in the near future.”