The Great British Lift-Off

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

At the last Farnborough International Airshow in 2018, the United Kingdom started the countdown to the first orbital launch from the country. The U.K. Space Agency announced it selected a site near the town of Sutherland in northern Scotland to host a vertical launch facility, and awarded $38 million to two companies to perform launches there. Other launch companies and prospective spaceports also announced plans to develop and launch rockets in the county.

Four years later, as the aerospace industry prepares to squeeze onto trains and line up for shuttle buses to return to Farnborough, that countdown still hasn't reached zero. The Sutherland launch site hasn't been built yet, while British companies that might use it or other launch sites are still working on their vehicles. The first orbital launch from the U.K. now appears likely to be performed by a U.S. company, Virgin Orbit, whose LauncherOne air-launch system is scheduled to fly from Spaceport Cornwall as soon as September.

Launch companies in the U.K., though, are not deterred by that slow progress. While lagging American launch vehicle developers, they see themselves at the forefront of the European small launch industry, with ambitions to begin launches in the next year or two.

One of the companies that received awards from the U.K. government in 2018 was Orbex, which is developing a small launch vehicle called Prime it plans to launch from Sutherland, capable of placing up to 180 kilograms into orbit. [...]

In close competition with Orbex is Skyrora. It is working on Skyrora XL, a three-stage rocket designed to place payloads weighing up to 315 kilograms into sun-synchronous orbit. It is also working on Skylark L, a suborbital sounding rocket intended to test some of the technologies needed for the larger Skyrora XL.

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