UKH

Perhaps a somewhat specialist question, but can anyone help me understand why we apparently now have a spaceport in Newquay? It seems rather too far north of the equator for efficient launches to equatorial orbits and too far south for efficient launches to polar orbits. So what's the reason for locating it where it is? Apparently the UK builds a lot of satellites, but I'm struggling to believe that the cost of transporting such high-value object to a launch site is critical. What am I missing?

(Cynically I wonder if this is just a case of post-brexit space industry development budget being dual-used for regional development. I feel sad for the people involved in the failed launch though, and hope they're successful next time.)

Perhaps it's for the publicity bolloxs?

I'm no expert but my understanding is that the UK wants to become more self-sufficent in launching our communications satellites rather than depending on the US to carry our stuff and also to become a global player satellite building and luanching and spaceport building.

I'd hazard a guess that Cornwall was chosen as you can easily fly out over the sea to carry out the launch from the aircraft - so if it goes wrong it doesn't drop on habitated places. The cargo, by nature of being a big rocket, could be a bit volatile.

There are plans for another 2 spaceport in the wilds of Sutherland and in Shetland but these will be the 'traditional' rocket launch from ground rather than using an aircraft.

We were dependent on European and Russian launches, Brexit and Putin screwed that up.

US is the least preferred option

The loss of the Antonov transport plane also might be problem

We need comms satelites, Russia (and China and India) are able to go beyond the previous anti sat capability (such as MIG-31D with 1 Vympel ASAT missile) see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon and possibly have effective laser weapons not just to temporarily dazzle spy satellites but to be able to knockout low earth orbit sats. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peresvet_(laser_weapon)  so countries are interested in the ability to quickly chuck up some more low earth sats in a hurry.

Virgin Orbit can provide that, and has been launching in Nevada, but UK capability is seen as a strategic/defence capability. Newquay is one of the least-bad UK locations being South and can get a flight out to ocean without having to fly over Ireland or something, it is an ex military airfield with a tarmac runway 2,744 meters and not too far from other "interesting" facilities for telecoms and defence like  ahem...   Bude <cough> 

The sheer numbers (3000!) of low earth communications satellites and the number (50!) that can be sent up in a single(!) weekly(!) rocket launch make the systems extraordinarily resilient to anti-satellite weapons. 

It would require ground based or airborne lasers as surely nobody has enough anti-satellite missiles.  

The numbers and exclamation marks refer to Starlink & SpaceX.

Very useful for national security payloads.  Less politics in launching, potentially better availability and less advanced warning to others with an air launch system, and no need to hand over a lot of sensitive information on the payload to foreign authorities (as needed when using a US launch provider for instance).

Useful for small payloads, anyhow.

It does seem a bit disappointing, we're the poor relation for sure.

The US Military have (50% of) Starlink and SpaceX -- but we have a contract with Richard Branson and an old 747.

But better something than nothing and thinking about it if I had to chose between being dealing with Branson or Musk, I'd definitely choose Branson. If there is a sudden and urgent rush to chuck some replacement sats up somewhere and we depended on SpaceX we may be at the end of a long queue

Yes, but for equatorial orbits you have to launch west to east to take advantage of the boost provided by the earth's rotation. Thats why NASA launches from Florida (about as far south as its possible to go in the US) and ESA launches from French Guiana - both sites are near the equator. And in case of a launch failure they also have nothing but water to their east. Newquay doesn't have any of that - its a long way from the equator and there's a densely populated landmass to the east. This is presumably why they have to fly out to release the launch vehicle south of Ireland. In any case, the launcher seems to pass over the UK mainland on its way up

Conversely, for polar orbits you want to be as far north as possible so that the launcher starts with as little west-east velocity as possible. I can see why the north of Scotland makes more sense for this - but even that is not that far north, and wouldn't Norway or Iceland make more sense?

Paging Wintertree...

Look at the diagram infographic https://virginorbit.com/launch/ and select Low earth orbit, note one of the dotted lines is diagonal north east to south west crossing nearish to Cornwall, it's infographic promotional so several large pinches of salt needed but you see what they're aiming at 

I think it's safely distant from Crab Key

The  now approved Sutherland site is (was?) a protected European status designated landscape and was subject to intense objection from environmental bodies. Many other less sensitive location would have been suitable but were never tested. If we can't protect such locations then we'll have GPS coordinates alright but nowhere left worth visiting. Space maybe ?

Or space bourn lasers.  Powered by a space based fission reactor.

Or high energy microwave beams, potentially masers.  Less problems getting them through the atmosphere for a whole bunch of reasons.

Or other satellites that sneak up and clip solar panels off.  Solar ion drive powered to work their way around an orbital shell over time.

Or a scorched earth (space) denial of an orbital shell with debris.

I’d go with microwaves; there’s only so much power cheap/light weight comms satellites specifically designed to receive microwaves can resist.

I remember having a conversation with someone about microwave weaponry at a thing and what it could do to a satellite nearly 20 years ago.  Oh I'm old but it must have come on a way since then.  It was simple but clever stuff back then.

Cheers

Toby 

The other scenarios are unlikely at best, but the above would require some serious power and a good dose of luck in targeting, and being a cheap small satellite there will be many of them as back ups.

Microwaves???? Meh... Space Lasers, that's what we want. Lasers are obviously cooler than microwaves, those are for damp and chewy jacket potatoes.

Very big space Lasers, with a big twisty coil at the front that lights up making futuristic sound effects, oh... and a secret button that makes a giant globe of the earth rise up out of the floor in the middle of the room.

Am I really asking too much, I don't think so.

I don't think they are unlikely.  I think they are inevitable as space becomes the new battleground.  They're more likely to be deployed against large, high value communications and reconnaissance assets perhaps.

For example, satellite-on-satellite attacks have been piloted in all but name by on-orbit refuelling work such as  OSAM-1 (NASA) and RAFTI (Lockheed Martin), Tetra-5 (US Space Force) and various others and on-orbit docking of satellites such as MEV-1 (Northrop Grumman).  I believe there have also been one or two unexplained instances of a satellite shadowing another satellite.  The good news is that Russia's space program is basically imploding at this point (particularly difficult issue emerging with the duff Soyuz on the ISS right now...) but China... Given time...  

Solar panels are really quite fragile...  The giant constellations of (V)LEO comsats consist of many orbits, each with many satellites phased around the orbit.  One killer-sat can phase around an orbit and munch a whole bunch of crunchy comms satellites.  There's a proposal for a space debris clearing satellite with effectively unlimited propellant by using a ball-mill to grind debris into a fine powder for use with an ion drive.  Joining a few dots...

Nuclear reactors in space have been a thing.  The F-35C has been designed from the start with the intent that an electrical generator could replace the VTOL lift-fan; to which something like 22 MW mechanical power is delivered if I recall correctly.    The new generation of US carriers have a massive upgrade in electrical power over previous generations - well beyond what they currently need.  A lot of platforms are moving towards providing serious power.    

But with a large enough phased array to concentrate the power, I doubt it needs more than you'd get from your average power grid.

There was a recent estimate on Reddit that SpaceX have launched 22 MW of solar power in to orbit with Starlink this year, and that's before their big rocket comes online, and with satellites optimised for other purposes.  

There's growing interest and capability in producing highly accurate, real time databases of orbit locations of everything in orbit using multiple data sources including radar and all-sky survey cameras (including I think occlusions).  Something the UK has activity in.  Also, on the targeting front, if you can get reflection or comms beam from the satellite, you can phase conjugate it for near auto-magic targeting.

There are spares within each ring I think that can be phased round to fill in gaps; but that takes time...  The objective might not be to remove all satellites but to put some predictably timed holes in the coverage for a specific area which probably only involves taking out a sub-set of 2-3 rings.

It's not like you can see the beam in space...  Well, unless it's suddenly filled with a ball of expanding hydrazine...

Related questions, in case anybody has any insight:

1. Why was the launch scheduled for such an odd time? It's hard to think that there are any particular constraints.
2. Why was the associated live stream so absurdly amateurish? Hardly a good advert.

Nonsense man, did you never watch Moonraker? you can both hear and see the laser beams in space

A key point of the confusion over the Lunar super-weapon in Arthur C Clark's "Earthlight".  

I thought the same. Why were they so vague about where the rocket had gone? Surely it had telemetry on the thing that would have told them exactly the path it took into the ocean (unless it blew up).

Probably wasn't very chatty by the time it reached the ocean:  youtube.com/watch?v=yUhxkPp4Mcw&

The launch location being underneath the orbit you want to get into is a pretty obvious one.

I don't think that introduces any time constraints at all, does it? Either the orbit in question is physically and geometrically achievable from the launch site, or it isn't. How would time of day come into it?

Twice a day it is. Rest of the time it isn't. That becomes once a day if you have to launch away from Ireland.

Orbital phase - where in the orbit it is at a specific time.   Oddly enough many applications care deeply about this…

Satellites have small thrusters that can be used to adjust orbital phase but the less of their propellant that is used for this, the more remains for station keeping - offsetting the tenuous drag of the very high layers of the atmosphere that stretch up to LEO.  So, the more correctly phased (timed) the launch, the longer the satellite can stay on station.  Time constraints can be down to 1s for some launches where the payload has to rendezvous with something else already on orbit.

Not even that; hard to see how you'd get into the plane you want unless you wait until it's overhead. Can be done with costly and slow precession faff but that requires a lot of additional burns and takes ages. Best just to wait a few hours.

In answer to the OP, the site is ideal for SSO. Compare to Vandenberg.

The revival of Particle Beam weapons development?

going to a simpler idea, why not have a roving spraypainting rig that just cosies up to anything with a solar array and paints over the panels?

It's not technically a space port but when the space shuttle missions started the USA wanted a bunch of readily available runways of the required length for the shuttles to land at if they re-entered.

The runway in Cornwall is an RAF Base, St Mawgan, think they run commercial flights now but its controlled by the RAF!

There's a few super size runways about. Guess there's nothing better than re-entering earths atmosphere and smashing a pasty!

Yes - both reasons make sense, thanks. It's all 'just' Newtonian dynamics - but the details can get very confusing, and very complicated.

There were nine satellites on the failed launch, so presumably all were after some specific set of orbits. Is anybody able to calculate/infer from the time of the launch window exactly what those orbits might be, and why they're desirable?

I can't find any details on-line. But possibly a lot of the details are deliberately kept secret.

The launch was intended to be into a sun synchronous orbit at 550km altitude. This orbit is interesting because it means the spacecraft passes over the ground at the same local time every time. This is common for earth observation satellites which can use the constant illumination of the earth to make consistent measurements.

This might have been important for some of the satellites, and since it was a ride share, they all get a similar orbit.

Bird strikes can be lethal for jets so impacting an aerial pasty can't be good

The older launch sites are close to the equator, french Guiana , Texas, bikanor, because achieving geostationary orbit is considerably easier if the earth is moving in only one axes. Geostationary satellites are all fixed above the equator. Other orbit types are becoming more common because low cost smaller scale lower power satellites are now available. These orbit much lower and circulate around the poles sweeping around in longitude for example. These satellites are low power but are often deployed in groups that sweep along the orbit in a chain. Almost all of these satellites are mobile phone base stations and they are being launched in their thousands where as the older generation of bug geostationary satellites are launched only every few months. The small sats only need relatively small rockets whereas the geostationaries are much heavier and need the likes of Ariane 5. The reason then for Cornwall spaceport is that the small sats use small rockets and there is no particular benefit from being near the equator. Finally as we just saw all rockets fail once in a while so they are always launched away from humans. 

Good information. Thanks.

A good explainer here: youtube.com/watch?v=VIQr1UyhwWk&
Different orbits, different example, but illustrates the faff you avoid by waiting on the ground for the right time to launch.