The spaceport is at the tip of Scotland on an island. That's got to be one helluva commute to transport the rocket parts up there (the article mentions they're manufactured in Germany and assembled on-site).

Well, if they're talking about a licence being granted for something in the UK, you know it's getting serious.

I do wonder about the utility of this. You'd think that in Europe, there are better places to launch a rocket if you're trying to do it efficiently. Shetland is "a subarctic archipelago", meaning it's going to be cold most of the time, not to mention remote. You're also fighting against physics because the further you get from the equator, the less the planet "slingshots" you into orbit. I would think southern Italy would be a better place, though it's probably far more densely populated and you're more likely to hit something precious if your rocket doesn't work.

Presumably this would mostly be used for polar orbits, where the slingshot effect doesn't apply.

Note that Israel launches their rockets west, fighting the slingshot effect rather than taking advantage of it by launching east.

At that point, it's basically an ICBM: Inter-Continental Beef Missile.

From Wikipedia - "On 29 March 2021, Historic Environment Scotland (HES), a statutory body, refused consent for the development of the spaceport on the grounds it would impact a scheduled monument of national significance – the Chain Home radar station at Skaw."

I don't understand why anyone would want to run the regulatory risk of doing this sort of thing in the UK, which is very anti-development. The facilities also look like little more than some tarmac and a metal shed. As a Brit I'd love to speak more positively of this venture, but it feels like LARPing.

Well to little to late, the only Serious competitors are SpaceX, Rocketlab and China. There will never be a serious space company in Europe because our regulators are busy making sure that we have the European way of life that they are used to. Arianespace is dead on arrival

Launching from that high of a latitude feels like it could be a problem. Basically only the polar orbits will be available.

But, are those polar orbits more accessible from Shetland than from more equatorial locations? Is that potentially useful? Does the lack of earth assist matter for the kinds of small satellites that can be thrown by the rockets applying to use this site? (I don't know the answers, it's not a rhetorical question.)

And where else can Europe launch from (under its own control) other than French Guiana? Shetland is closer than that, if a bit shorter on cool lizards and post-launch umbrella drinks. Maybe the idea is to keep using French Guiana for full-scale Ariane launches, and Shetland for cheap launches of little things that would be too expensive to ship across the Atlantic?

> It will then travel north west, out over the Norwegian Sea and the North Pole, before hopefully entering orbit around 500km above the surface of the earth.

Looks like that's what theyre going for. There's already a lot of equatorial launch sites, I'm not sure how many polar ones there are