By Peter Tremayne
Cornwall councillors are bracing themselves for the next assault on their budgets as officials try to talk up the prospects for a new customer to replace Richard Branson’s failed Virgin Orbit project.
Several councillors were surprised yesterday (Saturday) to see a message from Newquay spaceport bosses saying that it was “business as usual” despite news from California that Mr Branson is abandoning his satellite launching business. Mr Branson had been the spaceport’s only potential launch customer.
The statement said the collapse of Virgin Orbit would have “no direct impact on the team or project” and that County Hall was looking forward to “future launch operations.”
The reference to “future launch operations” was particularly puzzling because Newquay is limited to horizontal space flight, and only one other company in the world, the US defence contractor Northrup Grumman, has the capability of undertaking such missions.
Northrup Grumman uses solid-fuel rocket engines and has no interest in Newquay’s liquid-fuel based facility.
In fact, any chance that the £20 million steel shed next to Newquay Airport might have a connection with any extra-terrestrial ventures now rests with an American company hoping to build a replacement for the US space shuttle system, which was abandoned in 2011. Two major accidents, the first in 1986 and the second in 2003, each killed the seven member crews. There were also some fatal accidents on the ground during the 30-year history of the shuttle.
As Cornwall Reports has previously noted, the Sierra Nevada company now plans to send its Dream Chaser capsule on top of a conventional vertically-launched rocket, from Florida, to the International Space Station. It plans to be a cargo supply system, similar to the space shuttle. The much-delayed first mission is now scheduled for mid December.
Sierra Nevada does have a Memorandum of Understanding with the Cornwall spaceport to provide landing facilities, but Newquay is only one of several such sites around the world. Sierra Nevada’s main interest, in Europe, appears to be a landing runway in Germany. Cornwall is still very long way from having any kind of contract, even if the technology works.
The short-term future for the Newquay spaceport appears to be as an out-of-school classroom for pupils. About 1,500 children have visited the site on day-trips since January.
(Monkey?) business as usual?
”An Exeter based company” paid thousands to rent a hot desk indeed?”
How much more of this ”right on” twaddle do we have to endure before our comatose councillors wake up to the fact that the long suffering people they pretend to represent are being taken for complete utter fools by being forced to underwrite this economic disaster zone.
In my days as a successful self made businessman it automatically followed that a private business needed to supply a product or service that consumers needed in order to generate income streams to survive, there being no public purse to underwrite failure it is a simple matter of sink or swim.
When ones own house is on the line in the unforgiving real world it tends to focus ones attention on swimming however the dead hand of public sector just seems to live on handouts of our collective money on demand
Whatever the eventual outcome it is patently clear that Spaceport Cornwall is already holed below the waterline and in reality about to sink without trace.
We mustn’t forget that INOX was Exeter based too! Coincidence perhaps??
Illusions, illusions and more illusions is all that ever seems to come from County Hall these days. And we are paying 5% more just to enable their dumb stupidity!
For Gods sake will someone not have the guts to put this misbegotten money pit out of its misery.
When I saw the headline I was going to remind you that April Fools day was yesterday, but then I saw that the press release was yesterday so I fear you at Cornwall Reports must yourselves have been April Fooled
ROFL
Thank you for your continued reporting on this.