The Sunday Times February 6, 2022 7BUSINESS
JON
YEOMANSM
elissa Thorpe’s love of avi-
ation was sparked by
watching her father fly a
water-bombing plane
over the wilderness of
Canada, dousing forest
fires. She flew in his air-
craft as a child, but poor
eyesight stopped her
becoming a pilot. Now
her dreams are being realised in a differ-
ent way — as the woman at the forefront
of getting a space launch off British soil
for the first time.
Thorpe is director of Spaceport Corn-
wall, a project at Newquay airport where
the hope is to begin unmanned commer-
cial space flights. Later this year, Sir Rich-
ard Branson’s Virgin Orbit plans to
launch a satellite from a rocket mounted
below a Boeing 747 that will take off from
Cornwall. It is one of several projects
hoping to realise the dream of British
spaceflight this decade. But can these
schemes succeed? Do they deserve to
receive taxpayers’ money? And why do
we need take-off from the UK?
Plans to establish Cornwall as a space
hub have been in the works since 2014,
giving rise to the inevitable jokes about
“pasties in space”. But Thorpe outlines a
more serious vision of low-cost, orbital
services: “We’re basically upcycling an
airport and an old airliner to get to
space.” Cornwall will offer “horizontal
launch”, meaning that spacecraft will
hitch a ride on the back of a standard jet
before detaching to climb into space. In
the case of Virgin, the 747 will fly to a
height of 35,000ft before the rocket lifts
the payload into low-earth orbit.
Orbit’s sister company Virgin Galactic
has pioneered similar launches from the
Mojave desert in the US. Unlike Galactic,Space was a pet
project of Dominic
Cummings, who
pushed for a
£400m public
bailout of OneWebup a gear and, its supporters hope, ride a
wave of demand. It will also provide an
alternative to increasingly busy launch
pads overseas.
There are about 10,000 satellites cur-
rently in orbit, a figure expected to jump
tenfold by the end of the decade. Elon
Musk’s SpaceX has made bulk deliveries a
routine event, completing 31 flights and
deploying hundreds of satellites in 2021.
This, along with technological advances
that make satellites smaller and lighter,
has brought down launch costs mas-
sively. At the same time, the number of
uses for satellites has exploded.
“There’s an almost exponential
demand for satellites,” said David Oxley
at Highlands and Islands Enterprise,
which is backing spaceports at Suther-
land, in the far north of Scotland, and at
Unst on the Shetland Islands, all offering
traditional “vertical” launch facilities.
The Shetland project has won the back-
ing of US giant Lockheed Martin.Those championing the UK as a base
argue that it is reasonably well situated
for launches into polar or low-earth orbit,
but what about the weather? “It’s not Cal-
ifornia or Florida, unfortunately! There
are better places to launch in the world,”
admitted Volodymyr Levykin, founder of
Edinburgh-based Skyrora, which also
wants to launch rockets from Shetland.
But he said that for a northward launch in
a depopulated area, the Unst base is as
good as rival sites in northern Europe.
Skyrora is using technology that was
tested in Britain’s aborted Black Arrow
rocket programme of the 1970s. It has
also designed an “eco” fuel made from
recycled plastic waste. Such blue-sky
thinking does not come cheap. Levykin
admits that his company is a “high-risk,
capital intensive” project; Skyrora wants
to raise about £30 million this year.
Should Skyrora and others get off the
ground, space could soon be thick with
satellites training their lenses on the
Earth, creating a cloud of data to be
mined down below. That is the vision of
Mark Boggett, chief executive of Sera-
phim Space Investment Trust, which
listed last year to invest in space compa-
nies. “Space is going to save humanity.
It’s going to help us better manage our
planet, and it’s going to help us catch the
guys who are doing bad things,” he said.
Boggett cites the example of GPS satel-
lites that can locate your position to centi-
metres instead of metres, which will be
vital if autonomous cars are to become a
reality. Other probes can track climate-
change impacts down to a blade of grass.A
s the heavens become more
crowded, “situational awareness”
will be vital. Five years ago, ex-RAF
man Ralph Dinsley founded Norss
to help track orbital movements.
Last year it monitored the collision of two
Russian satellites, which created 1,500
pieces of debris. “There are so many
objects in orbit, there are millions of
close approaches daily,” he said.
Another growth area is on-orbit servic-
ing, where companies use space “tugs” to
pull broken satellites out of the way.
Before then, however, the UK has to
crack the art of the space launch. In Corn-
wall, Thorpe used an event at the Eden
Project last week to talk up the sustaina-
bility credentials of her spaceport.
Not everyone is convinced. Oliver
Baines, of local activist group The Good
Companions, said: “It just seems this
completely flies in the face of any sensible
targets to get to net zero.” He added that
two flights a year made it “hardly viable
as an enterprise... What’s the point of
spending all this money?” Funds for the
port “could have been better spent on
local services”, the Green Party said.
Thorpe insisted Cornwall would stand
for “responsible launch practices”. She
said: “The UK is quite a heavy hitter in the
space industry. I think it will take a global
lead in some really new areas of space.”ILLUSTRATION: JAMES COWENBate, a physicist and former adviser to
David Cameron. He has also been vice-
president of commercial at Babylon
Health, the health app that was report-
edly advised by Cummings.
Last year, the government set out a
goal to create one of the “most innovative
and attractive space economies in the
world”. It followed this up last week with
a space defence strategy that threw
£1.4 billion at further projects, while
spaceport developers also received
another tranche of cash. The UK remains
a member of the European Space Agency,
which is not an EU body and to which itBritain gets ready to
blast off
Cornwall and the
Shetland Islands are
planning satellite
launches. Is it a
good use of
taxpayers’ money?pays a tidy £374 million a year.
The UK is noted for its expertise in
manufacturing satellites but has, until
now, lacked a way of getting its own hard-
ware into space. The ability to provide
satellite launches could move the sectorTHE COST OF SENDING CARGO INTO
SPACE HAS PLUMMETED
Cost per kg of payload
to low Earth orbit
$100,0000.101101001,00010,000Logarithmic scale: inflation adjusted to year 2000. Source: Seraphim1980 20900.01Falcon Heavy
(2020) $951/kgFalcon 1
(2006) $9,930/kgSpace
Shuttle
(1985)
$26,884/kghowever, Cornwall will not be offering
passenger flights. “Satellite launch is
hard enough, so I think we need to get
really good at that first,” said Thorpe.
Spaceport Cornwall has swallowed
£20 million so far from a consortium
including the local council, Virgin and
the UK Space Agency (UKSA), part of the
department for business. Legislation last
year established a framework for space-
ports in the UK, with the Civil Aviation
Authority managing permits. Cornwall
will target two flights a year from this
year, but has a licence for up to 12. Virgin
Orbit has performed three commercial
flights in the US and wants Cornwall to be
its first base outside America.
The push into launches follows a dec-
ade of quiet expansion for the UK space
sector. It has grown 60 per cent since
2020 to turn over about £16 billion a year,
while jobs in the field have more than
doubled to 45,000. The UKSA invested
£515 million in space in 2021, up from
£362 million five years ago.
Space policy was a pet project of
Dominic Cummings, the prime minis-
ter’s former adviser. Controversially, he
championed the use of £400 million of
taxpayers’ money to rescue OneWeb, a
satellite business that was in bankruptcy
proceedings in the US during the pan-
demic. The UKSA’s chief executive is Paulintegration”. The latter may
be thorniest of all, suggests
Professor Mirko Kovac, an
expert in robotics and
unmanned craft at Imperial
College London. “How do
you integrate air taxis with
manned aircraft? With other
drones? And with operations
around buildings? And what
kind of software tools are
used to co-ordinate the
various agencies operating in
the air?” he asked.
Therein lies the rub: Wisk,
should its plans see the light
of day, will be just one private
operator in a buzzing
airspace, the regulation of
which will most likely be
done by others. Kovac
suggests that clever AI may be
able to borrow from insect
skills to navigate and police
the skies. But that belongs to
an entirely new frontier of
science. Building the taxis
may be the easy bit.
Hugh Osmond, a serial
entreprenuer who has
invested in Vertical
Aerospace, said: “Everybody
has got hurdles to overcome.
But there are enough firms
trying to do this, with enough
smart people, that it will get
done. And when it happens, it
will change transport in the
biggest way since the car or
the aeroplane.”Picture the scene: lanes and
lanes of clogged traffic. Red
tail lights as far as the eye can
see. And you’re late for that
work meeting, hospital
appointment or flight. Now
imagine being able to
leapfrog those waiting cars at
the touch of a button — and all
for the price of a moderately
expensive cab ride.
That’s the vision set forth
by one contender in the air
taxi space, Wisk, majority
owned by Boeing, which last
week gave an update on its
plans to roll out all-electric,
battery-powered flying
vehicles in at least 20 cities
globally.
Wisk’s goal is to offer short-
range taxi flights for as little
as $2 (£1.50) a mile — on a par
with, or slightly above, the
price offered by Uber’s
standard service. “We want to
have this be something that is
affordable and useful for
anyone,” said Gary Gysin,
Wisk’s chief executive. “This
market is going to scale up
tremendously. And we’re in it
for the long haul.”
Of course, Wisk is far from
alone in pursuing the dream
of flying taxis. Airbus and
Embraer have their own
models in development;California-based Joby
Aviation bought Uber’s air
taxi company last year; and
Bristol-based Vertical
Aerospace, which listed in a
US Spac last year, counts
Rolls-Royce among its
partners. Air taxi mania is
well and truly here: the UK’s
first hub for flying cars is due
to open in Coventry in April.
If that sounds like a project
that has jumped the gun
somewhat, note that Hyundai
liked the idea so much that its
own air taxi arm, Supernal,
took a stake in the company
behind the Coventry air hub
last month.
For its part, Wisk argues it
has a longer pedigree than
most. It is a partial spinout
from Kitty Hawk, an electric
vertical take-off and landing
(eVTOL) startup backed by
Google co-founder Larry
Page, which was founded in- Wisk was created with
Boeing in 2019, with Kitty
Air taxis that could Wisk you away
Hawk retaining a minority
stake. Last month the aircraft
giant sank another
$450 million into Wisk.
Gysin says Wisk’s air taxi
today is a “decades-long
effort, not two to three
years”. It is a pointed remark;
Wisk has been defensive of its
technology in the past, and
launched a lawsuit against
Archer Aviation last year that
alleged theft of trade secrets
after at least ten of its
engineers jumped ship for its
rival. Archer countersued,
alleging Wisk had smeared it.
Back in the real world,
Wisk has completed some
1,500 test flights in the US and
New Zealand. A sixth
generation of its taxi will take
to the skies this year.
Broadly speaking, air taxis
will need to satisfy
demanding requirements in
three areas: software,
hardware and regulation —
particularly around “airspaceJon YeomansWisk plans to
offer flights
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