LAST week, the anticipated launch of the first satellites from Spaceport Cornwall failed. The launch technology involves a modified Boeing 747 plane with a launcher rocket fired from its wing at 35,000 feet.

The rocket successfully ignited and left the wing over the Atlantic Ocean south-west of Ireland, but an “anomaly” with the second-stage engine meant the satellites were lost with the rocket. 

The launch had been heavily anticipated as a key moment for the British space industry. Though it may be entertaining to enjoy the public failure of a company associated with Richard Branson, that shouldn’t obscure the fact that this attempt was a part of a dramatic shift currently under way in space transport.

Last year saw 180 successful space rocket launches globally — more than any previous year. Launches were dominated by two groups: US company SpaceX owned by Elon Musk, and the Chinese government together with Chinese businesses.

As the journal Nature reported, the previous record for successful launches in a year was 61 by the USSR in 1980; last year SpaceX equalled that record with its own launches that power its network of Starlink satellites. It seems likely they will exceed it in 2023.

Data collected by astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell shows that in 2019 before the first Starlink satellites were launched, there were fewer than 400 satellites weighing more than 100kg in low Earth orbit — where satellites circle around the entire Earth in just over two hours.

There are now more than 3,300 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit. That precipitous increase looks set to continue. Space is getting crowded.

Space rocket technology dates back to the post-WWII era when Nazi rocket technology used to construct the V2 missile was harvested by the Allies. From the 1950s until 1971, there was a British government programme to develop a satellite-launching rocket.

Unfortunately, the fuel and technology of the time meant that the Black Arrow rockets had to weigh a huge amount. To get 100kg into orbit needed a 17.8 tonne rocket — a ratio of about 200:1 of carrier to cargo.

This was economically unsustainable and the programme was scrapped, with only one successful satellite delivered into space. From this point on, British satellites had to hitch a ride with whoever they could.

The British satellite industry is strong, but has always had to cope with negotiating launches on rockets outside Britain.

With Spaceport Cornwall, the government hopes to make Britain more of a centre for space technology. The spaceport is based in Cornwall between Newquay airport (where the 747 takes off from) and Goonhilly (where the control centre is based). The history of Goonhilly encapsulates the saga of privatisation in British technological industries.

An “Earth station” is a radio station on Earth that focuses on space, receiving and transmitting radio signals from spacecraft with giant satellite dishes.

In the 1960s space race, Goonhilly on the Lizard peninsula became the location of satellite dishes to communicate with the new satellites in Earth’s orbit.

This included Telstar, the television satellite launched in 1962 as a multinational agreement between US, British and French companies, allowing for the first transatlantic live television.

As an example of the problem of accumulating junk in space, Telstar is still orbiting the Earth today despite only functioning for a few months — radiation from a US nuclear test meant it stopped working.

Goonhilly Earth Station was built and owned by the General Post Office (GPO) — at the time a government department. Civil servants chose the site because of the hardness of the bedrock: the first dish weighed over 1,000 tonnes. At one time it was the largest Earth station in the world.

In 1969, the year of the Moon landing, GPO stopped being a government department and became a nationalised industry: the Post Office.

Telecommunications, including Goonhilly, were split off into a division of the industry called British Telecommunications — later to become BT.

The Thatcher years saw the privatisation of BT. In 1984, the government sold off more than 50 per cent of its shares in BT, and it passed out of state hands. Later shares were sold in the early 1990s by the John Major government.

BT was not yet a fully private company. The government retained a single share: a so-called “golden share” which confers the right to block corporate takeovers.

In 1996, the board of BT wished to merge with a US company, MCI Communications Corporation, so they asked the government to sell the golden share. The Major government didn’t, but in July 1997 the New Labour government under Tony Blair did.

That merger eventually fell through due to a bad reaction from investors. BT’s fortunes didn’t fare well over the next few years, although the mid-2000s saw them regaining ground with new purchases and acquisitions.

By this point, there was, however, less of a requirement for Goonhilly. In 2006, BT closed the station. In 2011 they sold the site to a new company, Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd, which took ownership in 2014, aiming to create a new space science centre.

As one expert from the National Space Agency commented to the BBC, the south-west of England indeed has a “really lively space cluster” of “businesses, research centres, manufacturing facilities.”

This surprising concentration of industry dates back to the original choice of Goonhilly for the ambitious original Earth station by a government department.

Eight years ago, the Goonhilly company launched a successful bid together with Newquay airport to become the Britain’s first spaceport — an actual launch site for rockets. The aim is to conduct 12 launches a year over the next five years.

Since 2021, Goonhilly has also been offering the “first private deep space communications network.” It wants to be the ground station of choice for major missions to the Moon and beyond, fielding communications from space probes that are beyond low Earth orbit.

The technology for the launch of rockets for the nascent spaceport is partnered with Virgin Orbit. The company is associated with Richard Branson but is in fact owned by Branson and a UAE sovereign wealth fund. Since 2022 it has been publicly listed on the stock exchange.

The failure to launch caused a slump in Virgin Orbit stock of about 25 per cent over the past week.

In an irritating tone that will be familiar to anyone who has travelled on Virgin trains, the company’s CEO apologised for failing to “provide our customers with the launch service they deserve.”

The launch failure has caused more scrutiny of its finances — it anticipates turning a profit by 2024, but is short of money. Branson reportedly injected $45 million at the end of 2022 to prevent cashflow problems.

Going to space is not easy. The technology involves thousands of components, and failure of any one of them can result in the loss of the whole rocket.

Such launches are prone to failure and all rocket programmes in history have had catastrophic failures before (in some cases) success. The space programmes of the 20th century were necessarily state endeavours.

Goonhilly Earth Station has been a microcosm of the development of space technology over the 20th century. It demonstrates that turning over responsibility and assets to companies means the government cannot control the outcome: as things stand, the viability of Spaceport Cornwall will be determined by financial markets.