LONDON: Final preparations were under way on Monday for the first rocket launch from UK soil, catapulting it into the “exclusive” club of nine nations able to send crafts into Earth’s orbit.

A repurposed Boeing 747 carrying the 70-foot (21-metre) rocket containing nine satellites was scheduled to take off from a spaceport in Cornwall, southwest England, at 3.16am(pst) on Tuesday.

The rocket will detach from the aircraft at a height of 35,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean to the south of Ireland before later discharging the satellites.

The aircraft will then return to Spaceport Cornwall, a consortium that includes Virgin Orbit and the UK Space Agency, at Cornwall Airport Newquay. The launch will be the first from UK soil. UK-produced satellites have previously had to be sent into orbit via foreign spaceports.

“Joining that really exclusive club of launch nations is so important because it gives us our own access to space...that we’ve never had before here in the UK,” Spaceport Cornwall chief Melissa Thorpe told BBC television on Monday.

Over 2,000 people are expected to watch the launch named “Start Me Up” after the Rolling Stones song. “There’s two stages to it... two bits of excitement, really, the takeoff and then the deployment of the rocket,” Thorpe added.

The satellites have a variety of civil and defence functions from sea monitoring that will help countries detect people smugglers trafficking migrants to space weather observation. Although scheduled for Monday evening, adverse weather conditions could see the launch delayed or postponed to back-up dates later in January. The number of space bases in Europe has grown in recent years due to the commercialisation of space.

Published in Dawn, January 10th, 2023