The Commonwealth Space Agency
- Thread starter Dr Dee
- Start date
Dareonaut, after Dan Dare? (Probably starts as a joke and then catches on in an alternate timeline.)
fasquardon
marathag
Banned
And that it's on the other side if the Earth, a long time for anything to be shipped from the UK
Here is where I point out, Gozo, off Malta, is at 35°N, and 2500 miles by boat, and Ascension Island, at a desirable 7.9°S, 4400 miles away. Gozo would also be within Super Guppy air transport range for big items. Both have clear downwind areas
Ascention Island has the advantage of being closer to the equator and that a failed launch is less likely to cause any damage because it's literally in the middle of the Atlantic and sparsely populated.
I don't think much of Malta as a launch site, since there's some populated land within a normal second-stage drop distance, and the water downrange is some of the busier shipping lanes around. You're also locked pretty hard into an eastbound launch, with serious challenges forpolar. Ascension is more viable in that both of those ways, though you do have to plan on bringing literally all your own services support. Woomera at least has the military bases to help with your tracking and logistical needs. Clearly you just need to make a fully reusable vehicle, so you don't have to ship everything from Washington State...er, the UK.
Yeah.
The geography is great, but Ascension is literally in the middle of nowhere, with little local infrastructure beyond the RAF field. Everything has to be hauled in by sea from a long way off.
Australia is less convenient, but on the other hand, putting a launch complex there might make it easier to get Aussie and even Kiwi buy-in to the program.
Alternatively, one of the islands up in Scotland would have been quite doable. Yes, it would be relatively far north and launches would tend to be quite polar (especially if they want to avoid dropping stages on Norway, Sweden and Finland), but Scotland especially benefits from being close to the industry in the UK.
Another option is Newfoundland or one of the more southerly East Coast Canadian provinces which would be a fairly short crossing from the UK and would be close to the industry of the Great Lakes. St. John's is about 47 degrees north, so less northerly than Baikonur.
Ascension has the disadvantage of a program having to build pretty much everything it needed from scratch and shipping everything in and out. It is certainly doable, but penny-pinchers may oppose it.
fasquardon
Another option is Newfoundland or one of the more southerly East Coast Canadian provinces which would be a fairly short crossing from the UK and would be close to the industry of the Great Lakes. St. John's is about 47 degrees north, so less northerly than Baikonur.
Ascension has the disadvantage of a program having to build pretty much everything it needed from scratch and shipping everything in and out. It is certainly doable, but penny-pinchers may oppose it.
fasquardon
As has been pointed out both sites have their problems geographically. Perhaps the greatest problem is the lack of manpower. Launch sites require a fairly large number of personnel to make them work - to initially build them and then to man them. Malta has that. Ascension does not. Darwin has them and a long distance to any habitable land to it's east and it's north east. Australia has a largish population and could contribute a whole load more personnel when required. Darwin is a massive port. The city could be a suitable site for the construction of rockets. Neither Malta or Ascension could do that. I would think Ascension could be a suitable site. Darwin could be as well. Australia was interested in buying into this sort of project post war.
Con: Australia is a long, long way from the UK or Canada, which for some time will be the only places with industries capable of manufacturing many of the components.
Pro: Australia being the launch site is a way to get Australian politicians on board with a Commonwealth program.
It could go either way.
fasquardon
Australia had an industrial base. It was quite capable of building aircraft and ships. It was building the Snowy Mountains Scheme - a hydro-electric scheme designed to provide sufficient power for Uranium enrichment. It had a massive immigration scheme and was rapidly increasing it's population with Europeans. It was heavily involved IOTL in the British space programme. It had sufficient infrastructure to support the Commonwealth space progamme.
marathag
Banned
Johnston Atoll had even less than Ascension Island, and was able to support launches on the scale of Wallops on the US East Coast.
The US Navy had a large number of personnel who were part of a disciplined naval force...
marathag
Banned
Royal Navy wasn't short of that in the timeframe we are looking at.
Is this a goalpost shift to Civilian launch facility?
Roscosmos didn't exist till decades after Baikonur was lofting rockets.
This is why I think a Queensland coast location is probably best.
As is, London has a lot of bridge repairing to do with the ANZAC chaps... Giving them the spaceport would be a modest step in that direction.
Sure, a lot of components and expertise will only be found in Britain or Canada, and it will cost to ship that to Australia, but with some investment, you could build up some of that in Australia.
And having lots of local, secure infrastructure is no small advantage. It would be comparable in many ways to what the Cape offered in Florida in the late 1950's.
You have to go pretty far north before you completely run out of population, which dramatically limits payloads to equatorial orbits like geostationary, and those sites are far enough from major transport routes you almost need to plan on airlifting everything. If you're further south, you have more local population and better transport, but the range (though sparsely populated) is not unpopulated, which is a difference a democratic government can't ignore quite as easily as the Russians or the Chinese do.
In Morning of the Maple Leaf, I have Canada launching from Cold Lake , which is already at 54 degrees North, and the downrange from there has issues with dropping hardware into First Nations reservations--which in Morning of the Maple Leaf leads to Canada developing parachute-and-helicopter-based recovery. 54 degrees is already enough that it means ISS orbit can only be access by a dogleg--any further north and anything other than polar/sun-synchronous orbits are basically all you can serve without massive payload losses. For that reason, I'd originally been planning on a launch site in the Maritimes, which could be accessed by shipping hardware up the St. Lawrence Seaway from production sites on the Lakes, but that made too much sense for a joke TL.
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Queensland is too prone to Cyclones. Too many days each year would be lost to storms rolling in from the Coral Sea. Darwin only gets relatively few Cyclones each year.
Queensland has too many inhabited islands in the Coral Sea. They wouldn't appreciate falling first stages.
It also has the Great Barrier Reef which would complicate shipping to and from the launch site.
None of those factors affect Darwin.
I’ll note that in real life, there has been talk of a spaceport built in Cape Breton due to it being a good spot to launch from.
As an aside? One of the easiest ways to get at least satellite launching done would be to hook it up, at least early on, with a duel purpose launcher. One that could launch satellites or function as an ICBM in order to unofficially develop the capability. Japan has basically done this (pretty much everyone has figured out that their launchers can double as Ballistic Missiles if they wanted).
These don't seem to have been major objections to proposals for launch sites in the Cape York Peninsula (namely at Temple Bay and Weipa) in recent years... They were sunk more by lack of financing than anything else.