THE SKY’S NO LONGER THE LIMIT Two new strategies place the Highlands and Islands at the heart of Scotland’s growing space industry. The region’s unique geographic advantages look set to establish a new sector based around commercial satellite launches. The Scottish Government published ‘A Strategy for Space in Scotland’ in October, just weeks after the UK Government unveiled a similar plan. Aiming to claim a £4bn share of the global space market and create 20,000 jobs by 2030, the Scottish strategy identifies a key role for the Highlands and Islands to host a variety of launch facilities. With an increasing reliance on small satellites for everything from day-to-day communications to near-Earth observations tracking climate change, the rapidly expanding commercial space industry is keen to find new sites from which they can access low-earth orbits. “There is an opportunity for us to be Europe’s leading location for the launch of small satellites,” explains HIE's director of strategic projects David Oxley. “Compared to space missions from previous generations, these satellites and launch vehicles are much smaller and need access to low Earth orbits, which are easily accessed from our region. With the launch vehicles requiring a vertical path north over water to allow them to safely jettison their boosters, the Highlands and Islands is one of the few regions in Europe which can offer suitable launch sites.”
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Work is underway to establish satellite launch sites across the region. Space Hub Sutherland on the A’ Mhòine peninsula has already received planning permission, with the first launches anticipated within the next 18 months. With the capacity to ramp up to 12 launches each year, satellites launched from Space Hub Sutherland are expected to support communications technologies as well as providing earth observation data. A planning application for SaxaVord Spaceport in Shetland, meanwhile, is in the final stage of consideration at time of writing, while Spaceport 1 in North Uist is in earlier stages of planning. Each of these vertical launch sites offer different access opportunities, environmental conditions and payload capacity, and with explorations underway to establish the feasibility of a horizontal (i.e. shuttle-style) launch site at the disused Machrihanish RAF base in Argyll, it’s expected that the Highlands and Islands will soon offer a complete range of launch options to the commercial space industry.
