THE FINAL FRONTIER

ON July 8, 2014, an object the size of a whisky bottle travelled into space aboard a rocket which blasted off from Kazakhstan. Back at ‘mission control’ in Glasgow’s Maryhill there were groans as the live feed to the launch site went on the blink.

Alas, they’d just missed the birth of the Scottish space programme.

Still, the sense of occasion was keenly felt by then First Minister Alex Salmond, who customised a familiar space soundbite to reflect its enormity: ‘The UKube-1 launch might be one nanosatellite, but it is one giant leap for Scottish space exploration.’

Contrived, perhaps, but true. In the 45 years since the Americans had put men on the Moon the Scots had put nothing in space at all.

Now we had a nanosatellite, built by an outfit called Clyde Space, orbiting 300 miles up. It was a start.

The following year brought another leap. In October, a rocket launched from the Hebridean isle of South Uist travelled outside the Earth’s atmosphere. It was target practice for the US Navy’s destroyer USS Ross, which blew it to smithereens over the Atlantic on its way down. Nevertheless, here was the first man-made projectile ever to lift off from UK soil and go into space.

Small beginnings, perhaps. But some suggest the development of the Scottish space industry could yet hit warp speed. In a few years the nation may be home to the UK’s first spaceport – where the richest (and bravest) tourists will board spacecraft bound for weightless climes with spectacular views of their home planet.

It could also make Scotland a key European space hub for an industry expected to be worth at least £40billion to the UK by 2030.

Are we, then, moving up the field in the space race? Or is that final frontier still pie in the sky for a small country like Scotland?

Here we boldly report from the new worlds of Scotland’s space dreams.

SPACE TOURISM THOSE hoping to emulate the Armstrongs, the Aldrins or even the British astronaut Tim Peake, pictured, should manage their expectations.

Even when the first craft is ready to take them space- ward they will spend only minutes at t he very edge of it.

There won’t even be time – or enough altitude – for a quick orbit. Prices, meanwhile, will be prohibitive for all but the super-rich.

On SpaceShipTwo, for example, customers will pay around £150,000 to travel on the 60ft long craft, which has side and overhead windows. It will begin its journey attached to the White Knight Two aircraft until it reaches 40,000ft. Thereafter, it will disconnect, light its hybrid rocket engine and zoom up to around 62 miles from the planet.

There, zero gravity will be achieved for approximately six minutes. Then the six passengers will strap themselves in and come down to Earth. Film stars Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Tom Hanks are among those who have bought tickets already.

But XCOR may offer a cheaper route into space. A tidy £65,000 should be enough to buy a place next to the pilot on the cosier, two- seater Lynx, which takes off directly from the runway using rocket power. With journeys lasting just half an hour, the firm hopes to be able to fly up to four times a day.

A company spokesman said: ‘ There is j ust 15 seconds between lighting the engines and take-off. Then 50 seconds after lighting the engines you go supersonic and very close to vertical and are pushed back in your seat. Then three minutes after l i ghting the engines you are at 180,000ft.’ He continued: ‘ You are going more or less straight up at about Mach 3.

‘Then the engines cut off and you have about a minute and a half of zero gravity as you coast up to our peak altitude of 350,000ft – t hen another minute and a half of coasting back down until t here is enough atmosphere for the vehicle to feel it.’ Re- entry then takes about a minute and the craft glides back to land about 20 minutes later.

SPACE BUSINESS

JOB titles such as ‘spacecraft sales manager’ may be mislead- ing.Wh ileitis true Robin Sampson holds that position at Glasgow-based Clyde Space, there are no unsold space ships sitting in the business forecourt.

By ‘spacecraft’, the company means satellites – not the large communications one sat geostationary orbit 20,000 miles up, but tiny nanosatellites like UKube-1 which can be built for

‘Beam me up Scotty’ may prove prophetic – because our space industry is ready for blast-off to conquer...

a few hundred thousand pounds. ‘We are building around 60 of those satellites this year,’ said Jenni Doonan, head of business development at Clyde Space, which recently relocated from its Maryhill mission control to new headquarters in the city’s Finnieston.

She added: ‘We build satellites which are about the size of a whisky bottle. We try to give the customer an end-to-end solution. Come here and we will design your spacecraft; we’ll put your camera on your spacecraft and, i f we have a spaceport in the UK, it will be easier for us to arrange for the spacecraft to be launched.’

But what is the purpose of these ‘spacecraft’? In the main, they moni tor, measure, photograph and record events on Earth. Small satellite technology, says Miss Doonan, was used to help coordinate the emergency response to the recent flooding in Aberdeenshire.

Similar orbiting devices may be used to validate an insurance claim. Did the farmer really lose a corn crop due to flooding a year ago?

Or was he grazing cattle in that field? The nanosatellite can provide the answer.

‘The market we operate in is growing around 23 per cent every year in terms of the number of satellites and the total value of the market,’ says Miss Doonan. And, as it becomes cheaper to launch them from ‘local’ spaceports, that boom will accelerate.

Industry experts predict this area of business will be considerably more lucrative than space tourism.

By 2030 the UK is hoping revenues from the space industry will have leapt from the current £11.8billion to around £40billion, accounting for 10 per cent of the global space market. Information satellites will account for some £37billion of that.

Little wonder, then, that the Scottish Government is highly supportive of any and all Scottish spaceport bids.

SPACE POLITICS

BUT isn’ t Scotland for getting something? What if, rather like SpaceShipTwo, the nation detaches from her mother ship and zooms off on her own, taking her space port with her? Could an independent Scotland really be home to a United Kingdom spaceport?

Certainly there would have been little or no prospect of the Department of Transport and UK Space Agency favouring a Scottish bid if the nation had voted for independence in 2014.

The problem f or the official bidding process, which is expected to begin this year, is that the independence issue has not gone away. Indeed, it was alluded to jocularly at the Royal Aeronautical Society conference this week. Introducing the case for a Welsh spaceport, the delegate assured the audience there was no danger of Wales exiting the Union with the keys to the UK space industry in its trouser pocket.

Thus far, the Scottish bidders have been able to offer no such guarantee. Nor is the Department for Transport prepared to offer any comment on the effect of the independence question on any future spaceport decision. A spokesman said only: ‘The Government’s ambition is to establish a spaceport. This will provide a focus for regional and international investment, secure UK leadership in a new market and create jobs and opportunities for the UK.’

What is clear is SNP politicians now fully recognise the scale of the prize. Leading a debate on the future of the UK space industry last month, Central Ayrshire MP Philippa Whitford said: ‘ This is a real industry, not the “beam me up Scotty” or fretting about the dilithium crystals we see on the telly, but a multi-billion-pound industry.’

The days when space was for the ‘big boys’ – North America, Russia or China – were gone, she said.

And, just to show she knew exactly what she was talking about, she concluded her contribution with a Vulcan salute.

WATCH THIS SPACE

ULTIMATELY, 24-year-old Hannah Earnshaw, f rom Fort William, Inverness- shire, could prove the greatest pioneer in the Scottish Space Programme.

She is one of just five people from the UK – and d the only one from Scotland – still in with a shout of travelling to Mars to establish a colony there.

More than 200,000 Earthlings applied for the oneway trip and just 100 r e main. Of f those, around 24 are expected to be on the Mars One project some time in the next decade or so. One or two matters must be ironed out first.

Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, warn the crew of any manned mission to Mars would be dead within 68 days. Miss Earnshaw accepts it is risky, but says: ‘It’s definitely feasible.’ She adds: ‘The future of humanity is in space.’