Mark Piesing's Blog, page 10

My latest for The Smithsonian/ NASM Air and Space Quarterly: Remote (Controlled)

In the unforgiving Antarctic, drones are revolutionizing exploration and science.

Read my latest and well-received feature article for The Smithsonian/ National Air and Space Museum Air and Space Quarterly in full below or by following this link.

I am so pleased with my latest feature for Air and Space Quarterly. I would like to thank the scientists-explorers who have flown drones in Antarctica and shared their experiences with me and their amazing photographs.

It’s quiet in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a vast frozen desert in Antarctica. The valleys are covered in loose gravel that hasn’t seen a drop of rain for nearly two million years.

And yet there is life here, if you know where to look for it. The silence in this desert at the bottom of the world is periodically interrupted by the buzzing sound of drones—flying instrument platforms that scientists are using to map the distribution of microbial mats in the arid valleys. The mats, which are multi-layered sheets of bacteria and other microorganisms, serve as sentinel organisms whose health gives hints to the effects of climate change on the whole ecosystem.

Although the work is serious, there is joy on the drone pilot’s face as a remotely piloted aircraft flies along the dirty-white, cliff-like terminus of a glacier. “It’s thrilling to fly drones in Antarctica,” says Joe Levy, an assistant professor in the earth and environmental sciences department at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. “It’s just a ton of fun.” 

“It’s definitely exciting with $70,000 worth of drone and sensors coming at you,” says Paul Bealing, a geospatial science technician at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Bealing has been using drones since 2012, and he has built fixed-wing drones for use in Antarctica. “The trickiest bit is the landing,” he says. “There are no runways in the Dry Valleys, and you are trying to avoid rocks. The fixed-wing drones have no wheels, so it’s a landing on the belly.”

The earliest explorers of Antarctica recognized the value of aerial photography. In this image, members of the 1928–30 Byrd expedition place camera equipment aboard a Ford Trimotor named Floyd Bennett. (The Ohio State University, Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center Archival Program)

Antarctica’s environment is the most extreme on our planet. “The ice-imprisoned continent covers almost 6,000,000 square miles of the Earth’s surface—nearly as much as South America,” wrote Rear Admiral Richard Byrd in National Geographic. Byrd, who led several expeditions to the continent in the early 20th century, observed: “Much of the interior is less known than the sunlit side of the moon.” It was only when explorers and scientists took to the skies, risking their lives in the primitive flying machines of the 1920s, that the continent began to give up its secrets.

Even today, Antarctica remains a dangerous place for humans to fly, due to the extreme climate, magnetic fields that interfere with instruments, and the absence of infrastructure to assist with navigation and landing. Crashes have claimed hundreds of lives over the decades, most recently in 2019, when a Chilean air force C-130 crashed in Drake Passage with the loss of 38 passengers and crew. 

Now, an aerial revolution is reinvigorating what audacious aviators like Byrd started. In March 2008, scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) completed the first-ever series of flights by uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Antarctica. Each flight by a custom, university-built drone lasted 40 minutes and covered around 28 miles. Other than a manually controlled takeoff and landing, the drone flew a programmed flight plan. Fourteen years later, rotorcraft, delta wings, VTOL fixed-wing drones, and airplane-like drones that resemble cartoonish flying machines in The Adventures of Tintin are regularly put through their paces in the skies above Antarctica by their scientist-pilots during the all-too-brief summer fieldwork season. 

Antarctica is a vast natural laboratory, ready to yield copious amounts of data. There’s a million years’ worth of information about Earth’s ancient climate and atmosphere embedded in the ice and frozen soil. Today, the 26,500,000 gigatons of ice covering the continent has the potential to raise global sea levels by 187 feet should it melt—which makes Antarctica a crucial venue in understanding and predicting the effects of climate change. The surprise collapse of the Conger ice shelf in east Antarctica in March, within days of record high temperatures, shows how much more needs to be understood and how quickly.

Just as the miniaturization of technology has made it possible for engineers to design small cube satellites capable of exploring space on a low budget, the emergence of drones has offered unprecedented access to Earth’s last frontier. The up to $100,000 worth of instruments that even a $100 drone can carry enables scientists to explore Antarctica without pricey, polluting flights in fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. A drone equipped with the right technology can help captains of supply ships see over the sea ice for tens of miles ahead, cartographers to map inaccessible islands better than from satellite imagery, and scientists to test waters from remote lakes never before sampled.

Flying in Antarctica has always been perilous: In 1957, a UC-1 Otter airplane sustained extensive damage following a storm with winds in excess of 80 mph. (U.S. Antarctic Program)

The powerful cameras and sensors drones carry can be used to count penguin colonies in real time, measure the health of moss beds, and record the first signs that land is sinking or that algae blooms are spreading. These shifts in the ecosystem serve as subtle warning signs that the rate of melting ice is increasing. And the research drones conduct isn’t confined to land: Equipped with specialized sensors, they can measure air pressure and turbulence.

“It feels like being on the forefront of a revolution,” says Levy. “Drones give us a completely different way of seeing the continent. Geologists are always trying to climb the highest peak to look down on the landscape and see what’s going on, but drones let you do that anywhere, anytime, and however many times you want.” 

Off the Shelf

Scientists are achieving amazing things using off-the-shelf Chinese rotorcraft, which are reliable, relatively cheap, and easily replaced. For other tasks that need, for example, a longer distance or flight time, researchers can have drones purpose-built for them or build them themselves. “We were getting six to 10 minutes battery life out of a multirotor, and we were going to be constantly changing batteries, so we needed to come up with an alternative,” says Paul Bealing. “I built a bunch of fixed-wing drones, and they flew well down there. They are great if you have a long distance to cover or need a long flight time.”

Chris Klick, whose company Ritewing RC specializes in custom designs, built Bealing a delta-wing pusher prop that was as powerful as “a rocket ship,” says Bealing. And Bealing discovered the massive (by drone standards) My Twin Dream—a Chinese-built twin-engine aircraft that can carry a great of deal of equipment (a maximum takeoff weight of 13 pounds). 

“It is much more fun to fly fixed-wing aircraft, but it’s not about the flying, it is about collecting data,” says Bealing. The scientists are seeking the perfect balance between payload, range, and battery life, as well as portability. But you can’t have it all. While the fixed-wing aircraft can fly farther, researchers can’t put instruments beneath them since the craft don’t have wheels and therefore land on their bellies. By contrast, when Bealing flew an octocopter, he was able to fit it with a “big, very big, snow ice radar underneath.”

The Americans, New Zealanders, and the British aren’t the only ones flying UAVs on the frozen continent. Two research stations operated by Spain somehow cling to the rocky and inhospitable Deception Island, which is the ring-like caldera of an active volcano in the South Shetland Islands (close to the Antarctic Peninsula), and to Livingstone Island, with its bleak, icy mountainous interior.

It was on Deception Island that the flying-machine age of Antarctic exploration definitively arrived, when on November 16, 1928, Australian George Hubert Wilkins made the first flight in Antarctica, taking off in a Lockheed Vega for a 20-minute flight.

Nearly a century later, five Spanish researchers for the government-sponsored polar research project PiMetAn have carried out more than 100 drone flights over these islands and other parts of Antarctica to survey penguin colonies and perform other tasks. PiMetAn’s drone air force includes some five multicopters and a VTOL drone airplane that can fly autonomously for four hours. “Really, for us, the use of UAV and sensors onboard has meant a revolution for our scientific purposes because it has allowed us to improve the techniques of study, the quality and amount of data, and the acquisition of samples from inaccessible or very dangerous areas,” says the Spanish team in an email. “They have saved us time and resources and helped us minimize our impact on the flora and fauna.”

Paul Bealing holds a custom-built, delta-wing pusher prop. Fixed-wing drones “are great if you have a long distance to cover or need a long flight time,” he says. (Courtesy Paul Bealing)

Meanwhile, from its Rothera Research Station, the British Antarctic Survey continues to pioneer the use of remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS)—as the organization refers to drones—on the frozen continent for filming and science. RPAS also serve as scouts. “Our new polar vessel has now got a couple of RPAS on board, and the reason for that is that from the bridge, you can see 12 miles to the horizon, but when you are navigating in ice, you want to see further,” says Pete Bucktrout, BAS senior creative services manager and UAV pilot. “Although we can get some satellite imagery, there’s a delay in receiving it. Instead, if we stick a UAV straight up vertically above the vessel, we can see for tens of miles, in effect over the horizon.” They now have a tether for their drones, which means they can hold their position above the ship for far longer than just 15 minutes. “Similarly, we have vehicles traveling across Antarctica for science purposes, and when they are in an unknown area, they will stick up an RPAS in the air so they can see where the crevasses are,” says Bucktrout.

Such successes obscure the fact that it’s still a tricky business to fly drones at the ends of the Earth. “There’s definitely challenges to flying in Antarctica,” says Bealing. Cold is a big problem because batteries don’t hold charge so well and flight durations are shorter; sensors need specific temperatures to function; and controller screens can’t be seen in the intense sunlight. And 50 to 60 mph winds can endure for days at a time.

A drone captured this true color image of the Chinstrap penguin colony in Vapour Col, which is the second largest breeding colony on Deception Island. (PiMetAn Project) A drone captured this infrared image of the Chinstrap penguin colony in Vapour Col. (PiMetAn Project)

“No drone is going to be great in that,” says Levy. Making matters worse, he says, “sand and dust everywhere can generate static electricity.” Researchers need to carry their own generators with them to charge the drones (or additional batteries) and a tent to keep the drones out of the wind and dust when they are not flying. 

Then there is the remoteness. With no internet, there has to be a great deal more advance planning—a task made difficult by the “lack of maps and topographies of the flight areas, which is a challenge when preparing flight missions,” say the Spanish researchers.

Flying at the South Pole also plays havoc with magnetometers, which provide data that enables multirotor drones to maintain their orientation. That’s why UAVs in Antarctica have a tendency to “toilet bowl”—a wobbling motion going round and round. “It was really frustrating for the camera guys who would try to get a nice shot on a particular angle,” says Bealing.

Geologist Joe Levy operates a drone near Howard Glacier, which is situated in Taylor Valley, part of the McMurdo Dry Valleys. (Courtesy Joe Levy)

In advance of his trip to Antarctica, Bealing tried to do as much testing as possible to ensure all the components would work in such a harsh environment, but it still wasn’t enough. “We have a walk-in freezer which I would say goes down to minus 20 [Celsius], and we didn’t think it was going to get any colder in the summer in the Dry Valleys, where it’s usually around minus ten, minus five,” he says. “The only thing I wasn’t able to test was my catapult launcher with rubber bungees that I would use to launch my fixed-wing drone. So the very first time I launched in Antarctica, the bungees got too cold, they lost their bungee-ness, and they pretty much chucked the drone on the ground.”

Finally, there is the challenge that all drone pilots dread most: paperwork. Drones are regulated on every continent, and Antarctica is no exception. “A lot of scientists just want to grab a drone, stick a sensor on it, go to Antarctica, and collect data,” says Bealing. But, as Levy cautions, there’s a huge stack of forms they must fill in first, “talking about things like emergency procedures, communications procedures, and when will you fly, where will you fly.” Also, existing regulations tend to be narrow in scope. “Our flights have to follow the Spanish navigation laws, which are not always adapted to Antarctic flight conditions,” says the Spanish team.

For a continent so large and devoid of human life, the requirement that scientists must apply for permission to use drones in Antarctica from their respective governments can seem unrelenting, limiting, and time-consuming. Says Levy: “The whole point of flying drones in Antarctica is to discover things you couldn’t discover from the ground, and so the frustrating thing can be if you’re at the end of your operations area, and you discover that there is something interesting just beyond that, you can’t go to have a look without new clearances.”

The Do-It-All Drone?

In addition to sampling soil, microorganisms, and atmospheric gases that would otherwise be out of reach to scientists, drones could have a wider logistical application: transporting supplies and people. “I think it’s the next frontier for drones in Antarctica, and it is a lot safer if you could send a drone out across the ice shelf to help drag fuel to the South Pole than sending people,” says Levy. Automated eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) flying taxis are under development worldwide, and it’s possible some will find their way to Antarctica. 

Using a drone instead of a boat enabled a team of Spanish researchers to collect and analyze water in Crater Lake without contaminating their samples. (PiMetAn Project)

“Antarctica has enjoyed the fruits of the consumer revolution, but Antarctica is about as extreme a test that you can get for using drones and for new ways of exploring extreme environments, which then feeds back into the wider technological development,” says Levy. “It’s not just the beneficiary. It’s also a kind of proving ground for it, and a place for thinking about new ways that you can use old tools.”

If Professor Mirko Kovac, director of the aerial robotics laboratory at Imperial College London and head of the materials and technology center of robotics at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, has his way, scientists will no longer need separate drones for air, underwater, and water surface and instead will have one drone that can work in all three environments. 

His project, ProteusDrone, named after the Greek shape-shifting sea god, aims to build just that. Kovac has just been awarded a two-million-euro grant from Horizon Europe, the European Union’s key funding program for research and innovation, to develop shape-shifting drones that could be used in challenging environments, such as the Arctic and Antarctic to study climate change. Bimodal drones that can operate in two environs are already under development, but a drone that could function in all three milieus—water surface, underwater, and air—represents another level of complexity.

Five Spanish researchers for the government-sponsored polar research project PiMetAn have carried out more than 100 drone flights over Antarctica to survey penguin colonies and perform other tasks. (PiMetAn Project)

“Drones can currently sample water, but they are not metamorphic,” says Kovac. “They’re not changing their morphology like many animals do when they transition between air and water. The project will study and develop methods of metamorphosis, so that the drone has a structure in the air, and then changes this structure and adapts the propulsion system to move underwater or sail on the water surface by using soft robotics wings and embedded sensing and machine learning to change its aero-structures.”

Soft robotics focuses on the development of technologies that more closely resemble living organisms with higher levels of robustness and adaptability compared to traditional, rigid robots. “The role of robotics and AI in environmental sciences is just starting to be understood,” says Kovac. When these robots are deployed, they can be controlled by a scientist on the other side of the planet. “We have already demonstrated that a drone operator in London can operate a drone in Switzerland performing environmental sensing tasks,” he says. 

While such developments might prove a boon for exploration, drones operated from afar could also take a toll on the scientific comradery that has characterized international research in Antarctica. “It’s awesome being on the airplane with the folks going to the Italian base and talking with them about what they’re doing,” says Levy. “Seeing the Korean base and the Chinese base being built and having the researchers come through. It’s like an international conference at the smallest conference center at the end of the Earth.”

Drones can access remote areas, with a little help from their human operators: A member of a Spanish research team carries a hexacopter drone to Crater Lake on his back. (PiMetAn Project)

Unfortunately, storm clouds are gathering over the future of the continent. The Treaty of Antarctica committed 12 nations (now 46) to a demilitarized, peaceful continent based on the principle of international scientific cooperation. The agreement froze territorial claims that are now thawing along with the melting glaciers as governments begin arguing over the rights to the mineral wealth that soon will be easier to extract. 

“The problem is that drones can be used to carry out scientific research, spy on other countries, and identify resources for future exploitation, and the tensions over the dual-use nature of the technology are only likely to grow as the number and size of the drones used in Antarctica grow,” says Klaus Dodds, a professor of geopolitics at the University of London who has written about border disputes and the political history of Antarctica.

For better or worse, the Drone Era has come to the last continent on Earth.  

Mark Piesing is an aviation journalist and the author of N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia (Mariner Books, 2021).

Remote (Controlled)

In the unforgiving Antarctic, drones are revolutionizing exploration and science.

Read my latest and well-received feature article for The Smithsonian/ National Air and Space Museum Air and Space Quarterly in full below or by following this link.

I am so pleased with my latest feature for Air and Space Quarterly. I would like to thank the scientists-explorers who have flown drones in Antarctica and shared their experiences with me and their amazing photographs.

It’s quiet in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a vast frozen desert in Antarctica. The valleys are covered in loose gravel that hasn’t seen a drop of rain for nearly two million years.

And yet there is life here, if you know where to look for it. The silence in this desert at the bottom of the world is periodically interrupted by the buzzing sound of drones—flying instrument platforms that scientists are using to map the distribution of microbial mats in the arid valleys. The mats, which are multi-layered sheets of bacteria and other microorganisms, serve as sentinel organisms whose health gives hints to the effects of climate change on the whole ecosystem.

Although the work is serious, there is joy on the drone pilot’s face as a remotely piloted aircraft flies along the dirty-white, cliff-like terminus of a glacier. “It’s thrilling to fly drones in Antarctica,” says Joe Levy, an assistant professor in the earth and environmental sciences department at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. “It’s just a ton of fun.” 

“It’s definitely exciting with $70,000 worth of drone and sensors coming at you,” says Paul Bealing, a geospatial science technician at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Bealing has been using drones since 2012, and he has built fixed-wing drones for use in Antarctica. “The trickiest bit is the landing,” he says. “There are no runways in the Dry Valleys, and you are trying to avoid rocks. The fixed-wing drones have no wheels, so it’s a landing on the belly.”

The earliest explorers of Antarctica recognized the value of aerial photography. In this image, members of the 1928–30 Byrd expedition place camera equipment aboard a Ford Trimotor named Floyd Bennett. (The Ohio State University, Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center Archival Program)

Antarctica’s environment is the most extreme on our planet. “The ice-imprisoned continent covers almost 6,000,000 square miles of the Earth’s surface—nearly as much as South America,” wrote Rear Admiral Richard Byrd in National Geographic. Byrd, who led several expeditions to the continent in the early 20th century, observed: “Much of the interior is less known than the sunlit side of the moon.” It was only when explorers and scientists took to the skies, risking their lives in the primitive flying machines of the 1920s, that the continent began to give up its secrets.

Even today, Antarctica remains a dangerous place for humans to fly, due to the extreme climate, magnetic fields that interfere with instruments, and the absence of infrastructure to assist with navigation and landing. Crashes have claimed hundreds of lives over the decades, most recently in 2019, when a Chilean air force C-130 crashed in Drake Passage with the loss of 38 passengers and crew. 

Now, an aerial revolution is reinvigorating what audacious aviators like Byrd started. In March 2008, scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) completed the first-ever series of flights by uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Antarctica. Each flight by a custom, university-built drone lasted 40 minutes and covered around 28 miles. Other than a manually controlled takeoff and landing, the drone flew a programmed flight plan. Fourteen years later, rotorcraft, delta wings, VTOL fixed-wing drones, and airplane-like drones that resemble cartoonish flying machines in The Adventures of Tintin are regularly put through their paces in the skies above Antarctica by their scientist-pilots during the all-too-brief summer fieldwork season. 

Antarctica is a vast natural laboratory, ready to yield copious amounts of data. There’s a million years’ worth of information about Earth’s ancient climate and atmosphere embedded in the ice and frozen soil. Today, the 26,500,000 gigatons of ice covering the continent has the potential to raise global sea levels by 187 feet should it melt—which makes Antarctica a crucial venue in understanding and predicting the effects of climate change. The surprise collapse of the Conger ice shelf in east Antarctica in March, within days of record high temperatures, shows how much more needs to be understood and how quickly.

Just as the miniaturization of technology has made it possible for engineers to design small cube satellites capable of exploring space on a low budget, the emergence of drones has offered unprecedented access to Earth’s last frontier. The up to $100,000 worth of instruments that even a $100 drone can carry enables scientists to explore Antarctica without pricey, polluting flights in fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. A drone equipped with the right technology can help captains of supply ships see over the sea ice for tens of miles ahead, cartographers to map inaccessible islands better than from satellite imagery, and scientists to test waters from remote lakes never before sampled.

Flying in Antarctica has always been perilous: In 1957, a UC-1 Otter airplane sustained extensive damage following a storm with winds in excess of 80 mph. (U.S. Antarctic Program)

The powerful cameras and sensors drones carry can be used to count penguin colonies in real time, measure the health of moss beds, and record the first signs that land is sinking or that algae blooms are spreading. These shifts in the ecosystem serve as subtle warning signs that the rate of melting ice is increasing. And the research drones conduct isn’t confined to land: Equipped with specialized sensors, they can measure air pressure and turbulence.

“It feels like being on the forefront of a revolution,” says Levy. “Drones give us a completely different way of seeing the continent. Geologists are always trying to climb the highest peak to look down on the landscape and see what’s going on, but drones let you do that anywhere, anytime, and however many times you want.” 

Off the Shelf

Scientists are achieving amazing things using off-the-shelf Chinese rotorcraft, which are reliable, relatively cheap, and easily replaced. For other tasks that need, for example, a longer distance or flight time, researchers can have drones purpose-built for them or build them themselves. “We were getting six to 10 minutes battery life out of a multirotor, and we were going to be constantly changing batteries, so we needed to come up with an alternative,” says Paul Bealing. “I built a bunch of fixed-wing drones, and they flew well down there. They are great if you have a long distance to cover or need a long flight time.”

Chris Klick, whose company Ritewing RC specializes in custom designs, built Bealing a delta-wing pusher prop that was as powerful as “a rocket ship,” says Bealing. And Bealing discovered the massive (by drone standards) My Twin Dream—a Chinese-built twin-engine aircraft that can carry a great of deal of equipment (a maximum takeoff weight of 13 pounds). 

“It is much more fun to fly fixed-wing aircraft, but it’s not about the flying, it is about collecting data,” says Bealing. The scientists are seeking the perfect balance between payload, range, and battery life, as well as portability. But you can’t have it all. While the fixed-wing aircraft can fly farther, researchers can’t put instruments beneath them since the craft don’t have wheels and therefore land on their bellies. By contrast, when Bealing flew an octocopter, he was able to fit it with a “big, very big, snow ice radar underneath.”

The Americans, New Zealanders, and the British aren’t the only ones flying UAVs on the frozen continent. Two research stations operated by Spain somehow cling to the rocky and inhospitable Deception Island, which is the ring-like caldera of an active volcano in the South Shetland Islands (close to the Antarctic Peninsula), and to Livingstone Island, with its bleak, icy mountainous interior.

It was on Deception Island that the flying-machine age of Antarctic exploration definitively arrived, when on November 16, 1928, Australian George Hubert Wilkins made the first flight in Antarctica, taking off in a Lockheed Vega for a 20-minute flight.

Nearly a century later, five Spanish researchers for the government-sponsored polar research project PiMetAn have carried out more than 100 drone flights over these islands and other parts of Antarctica to survey penguin colonies and perform other tasks. PiMetAn’s drone air force includes some five multicopters and a VTOL drone airplane that can fly autonomously for four hours. “Really, for us, the use of UAV and sensors onboard has meant a revolution for our scientific purposes because it has allowed us to improve the techniques of study, the quality and amount of data, and the acquisition of samples from inaccessible or very dangerous areas,” says the Spanish team in an email. “They have saved us time and resources and helped us minimize our impact on the flora and fauna.”

Paul Bealing holds a custom-built, delta-wing pusher prop. Fixed-wing drones “are great if you have a long distance to cover or need a long flight time,” he says. (Courtesy Paul Bealing)

Meanwhile, from its Rothera Research Station, the British Antarctic Survey continues to pioneer the use of remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS)—as the organization refers to drones—on the frozen continent for filming and science. RPAS also serve as scouts. “Our new polar vessel has now got a couple of RPAS on board, and the reason for that is that from the bridge, you can see 12 miles to the horizon, but when you are navigating in ice, you want to see further,” says Pete Bucktrout, BAS senior creative services manager and UAV pilot. “Although we can get some satellite imagery, there’s a delay in receiving it. Instead, if we stick a UAV straight up vertically above the vessel, we can see for tens of miles, in effect over the horizon.” They now have a tether for their drones, which means they can hold their position above the ship for far longer than just 15 minutes. “Similarly, we have vehicles traveling across Antarctica for science purposes, and when they are in an unknown area, they will stick up an RPAS in the air so they can see where the crevasses are,” says Bucktrout.

Such successes obscure the fact that it’s still a tricky business to fly drones at the ends of the Earth. “There’s definitely challenges to flying in Antarctica,” says Bealing. Cold is a big problem because batteries don’t hold charge so well and flight durations are shorter; sensors need specific temperatures to function; and controller screens can’t be seen in the intense sunlight. And 50 to 60 mph winds can endure for days at a time.

A drone captured this true color image of the Chinstrap penguin colony in Vapour Col, which is the second largest breeding colony on Deception Island. (PiMetAn Project) A drone captured this infrared image of the Chinstrap penguin colony in Vapour Col. (PiMetAn Project)

“No drone is going to be great in that,” says Levy. Making matters worse, he says, “sand and dust everywhere can generate static electricity.” Researchers need to carry their own generators with them to charge the drones (or additional batteries) and a tent to keep the drones out of the wind and dust when they are not flying. 

Then there is the remoteness. With no internet, there has to be a great deal more advance planning—a task made difficult by the “lack of maps and topographies of the flight areas, which is a challenge when preparing flight missions,” say the Spanish researchers.

Flying at the South Pole also plays havoc with magnetometers, which provide data that enables multirotor drones to maintain their orientation. That’s why UAVs in Antarctica have a tendency to “toilet bowl”—a wobbling motion going round and round. “It was really frustrating for the camera guys who would try to get a nice shot on a particular angle,” says Bealing.

Geologist Joe Levy operates a drone near Howard Glacier, which is situated in Taylor Valley, part of the McMurdo Dry Valleys. (Courtesy Joe Levy)

In advance of his trip to Antarctica, Bealing tried to do as much testing as possible to ensure all the components would work in such a harsh environment, but it still wasn’t enough. “We have a walk-in freezer which I would say goes down to minus 20 [Celsius], and we didn’t think it was going to get any colder in the summer in the Dry Valleys, where it’s usually around minus ten, minus five,” he says. “The only thing I wasn’t able to test was my catapult launcher with rubber bungees that I would use to launch my fixed-wing drone. So the very first time I launched in Antarctica, the bungees got too cold, they lost their bungee-ness, and they pretty much chucked the drone on the ground.”

Finally, there is the challenge that all drone pilots dread most: paperwork. Drones are regulated on every continent, and Antarctica is no exception. “A lot of scientists just want to grab a drone, stick a sensor on it, go to Antarctica, and collect data,” says Bealing. But, as Levy cautions, there’s a huge stack of forms they must fill in first, “talking about things like emergency procedures, communications procedures, and when will you fly, where will you fly.” Also, existing regulations tend to be narrow in scope. “Our flights have to follow the Spanish navigation laws, which are not always adapted to Antarctic flight conditions,” says the Spanish team.

For a continent so large and devoid of human life, the requirement that scientists must apply for permission to use drones in Antarctica from their respective governments can seem unrelenting, limiting, and time-consuming. Says Levy: “The whole point of flying drones in Antarctica is to discover things you couldn’t discover from the ground, and so the frustrating thing can be if you’re at the end of your operations area, and you discover that there is something interesting just beyond that, you can’t go to have a look without new clearances.”

The Do-It-All Drone?

In addition to sampling soil, microorganisms, and atmospheric gases that would otherwise be out of reach to scientists, drones could have a wider logistical application: transporting supplies and people. “I think it’s the next frontier for drones in Antarctica, and it is a lot safer if you could send a drone out across the ice shelf to help drag fuel to the South Pole than sending people,” says Levy. Automated eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) flying taxis are under development worldwide, and it’s possible some will find their way to Antarctica. 

Using a drone instead of a boat enabled a team of Spanish researchers to collect and analyze water in Crater Lake without contaminating their samples. (PiMetAn Project)

“Antarctica has enjoyed the fruits of the consumer revolution, but Antarctica is about as extreme a test that you can get for using drones and for new ways of exploring extreme environments, which then feeds back into the wider technological development,” says Levy. “It’s not just the beneficiary. It’s also a kind of proving ground for it, and a place for thinking about new ways that you can use old tools.”

If Professor Mirko Kovac, director of the aerial robotics laboratory at Imperial College London and head of the materials and technology center of robotics at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, has his way, scientists will no longer need separate drones for air, underwater, and water surface and instead will have one drone that can work in all three environments. 

His project, ProteusDrone, named after the Greek shape-shifting sea god, aims to build just that. Kovac has just been awarded a two-million-euro grant from Horizon Europe, the European Union’s key funding program for research and innovation, to develop shape-shifting drones that could be used in challenging environments, such as the Arctic and Antarctic to study climate change. Bimodal drones that can operate in two environs are already under development, but a drone that could function in all three milieus—water surface, underwater, and air—represents another level of complexity.

Five Spanish researchers for the government-sponsored polar research project PiMetAn have carried out more than 100 drone flights over Antarctica to survey penguin colonies and perform other tasks. (PiMetAn Project)

“Drones can currently sample water, but they are not metamorphic,” says Kovac. “They’re not changing their morphology like many animals do when they transition between air and water. The project will study and develop methods of metamorphosis, so that the drone has a structure in the air, and then changes this structure and adapts the propulsion system to move underwater or sail on the water surface by using soft robotics wings and embedded sensing and machine learning to change its aero-structures.”

Soft robotics focuses on the development of technologies that more closely resemble living organisms with higher levels of robustness and adaptability compared to traditional, rigid robots. “The role of robotics and AI in environmental sciences is just starting to be understood,” says Kovac. When these robots are deployed, they can be controlled by a scientist on the other side of the planet. “We have already demonstrated that a drone operator in London can operate a drone in Switzerland performing environmental sensing tasks,” he says. 

While such developments might prove a boon for exploration, drones operated from afar could also take a toll on the scientific comradery that has characterized international research in Antarctica. “It’s awesome being on the airplane with the folks going to the Italian base and talking with them about what they’re doing,” says Levy. “Seeing the Korean base and the Chinese base being built and having the researchers come through. It’s like an international conference at the smallest conference center at the end of the Earth.”

Drones can access remote areas, with a little help from their human operators: A member of a Spanish research team carries a hexacopter drone to Crater Lake on his back. (PiMetAn Project)

Unfortunately, storm clouds are gathering over the future of the continent. The Treaty of Antarctica committed 12 nations (now 46) to a demilitarized, peaceful continent based on the principle of international scientific cooperation. The agreement froze territorial claims that are now thawing along with the melting glaciers as governments begin arguing over the rights to the mineral wealth that soon will be easier to extract. 

“The problem is that drones can be used to carry out scientific research, spy on other countries, and identify resources for future exploitation, and the tensions over the dual-use nature of the technology are only likely to grow as the number and size of the drones used in Antarctica grow,” says Klaus Dodds, a professor of geopolitics at the University of London who has written about border disputes and the political history of Antarctica.

For better or worse, the Drone Era has come to the last continent on Earth.  

Mark Piesing is an aviation journalist and the author of N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia (Mariner Books, 2021).

I am on ABC Radio’s Future Tense show on Sunday!

Airships return to the skies and a serious problem that could cripple long-range space travel

Airships return to the skies and a serious problem that could cripple long-range space travel

Broadcast Sun 14 Aug 2022 at 3:30am

Listen to it here

Several new airship ventures look likely to put the zip back into zeppelins.

They were once the very symbol of modernity, but over the past eighty years, Airships have become objects of curiosity and nostalgia.

Also, why our bones could be the greatest barrier to colonising Mars.

Guests

Charles Alcock – Senior Editor, FutureFlight.aero

Mark Piesing – Aviation reporter and regular contributor, BBC Future

Professor Steven Boyd – Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary

Mark Piesing – N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia, Custom House 2021

CreditsAntony Funnell, PresenterKarin Zsivanovits, Producer

Broadcast Sun 14 Aug 2022 at 3:30am

The pollution caused by rocket launches

Rocket launches are an integral part of our 21st-Century world. But how do we stop their polluting exhausts accelerating climate change?

Check out my latest feature for BBC Future in full below, or the original by clicking here.

The pollution caused by rocket fuel was a hot topic at the Farnborough International Air Show last week.

The Kazakh Steppe is a vast area of grassland that stretches from northern Kazakhstan into Russia. It is home to the world’s oldest spaceport, the Baikonur Cosmodrome. From its launchpads, both the world’s first artificial satellite and the first human spaceflight, Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1, were launched.

The fuel used by many of the rockets that blasted off from Baikonur was UDMH(unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine), a very useful propellant for the pioneering Soviet scientists. UDMH didn’t need a source of ignition. It could be stored at room temperature, and it released a lot of energy. Yet it came to be dubbed “devil’s venom” by the scientists who used it.

Devil’s venom was highly carcinogenic to humans and it’s blamed for turning a large area of the steppe into an ecological disaster zone. It’s reported that UDMH rained down on the grasslands when it spilled out of the used first and second stages of Proton rockets and poisoned the soil for decades to come.

In television, and film, spaceflight is usually represented as having little or no impact on the environment. Yet it should be obvious that rocket engines spew out pollution into the atmosphere, like any form of combustion-driven propulsion.

Perhaps the black carbon, or soot, and other emissions didn’t matter when only around 70 commercial rocket launches a year took place. Now that number has doubled; it is expected to increase significantly more over the next two decades due to the growth in demand for services like satellite internet services and space tourism. 

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At least three scientific research papers have already been published this year on the impact of rocket emissions on the atmosphere, temperatures, and the ozone layer. Some scientists are worried that these carbon particles can act like a form of geo-engineering by absorbing heat.

“We have been aware of it for a fair amount of time, but there haven’t been a lot of studies,” says Christopher Maloney, a research scientist at the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory, who is the co-author of one of the papers. “There are studies that go back to the early 2000s, and even a few beforehand, but it’s never been that big of a concern or focus because the number of rockets being launched every year was so small. Now if you look at the trajectory of the industry, or proposals from various governments, then we can expect to see a tenfold increase in rocket launches and emissions within the next 10 to 20 years, and that is why, suddenly, it’s starting to get momentum in terms of scientific research.”

The Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan has created a large zone of pollution thanks to vast amounts of toxic rocket fuel seeping into soil (Credit: Bill Ingalls/Nasa)

There is also a great deal of uncertainty as to the effects of rocket emissions on the atmosphere. Despite the work of pioneering scientists like Martin Ross, there has been little momentum to study the impact of space travel emissions on the atmosphere until recently because rocket launches were infrequent, the amount of emissions were low and it wasn’t seen as a major contributing factor to climate change.

The pollution caused by rocket emissions can also seem insignificant compared to the other challenges the world faces, and the benefits the space industry brings to a 21st-Century world. Indeed, the percentage of fossil fuels burned by the space industry is only about 1% of that burned by conventional aviation.

When we compare the amount emitted from rocket launches to aircraft, it doesn’t sound like a lot – Eloise Marais

“Last year’s number of missions was 144 worldwide,” says William Pomerantz, vice president of special projects at Virgin Orbit, which launches small satellites horizontally from under the wing of a Boeing 747. Their rocket uses about 1/20th of the fuel of typical ground-launched, heavy-lift rockets, and recent launches include satellites now playing a key role in the collection of climate data. “Given this volume, the space launch industry remains a relatively small driver of atmospheric emissions compared with say, commercial aviation with more than 20 million flights worldwide, and other industries.”

Eloise Marais, an associate professor in physical geography at University College London, and co-author of one of the recent research papers, thinks this comparison is “erroneous”.

“When we compare the amount emitted from rocket launches to aircraft, it doesn’t sound like a lot,” she says. “But this comparison was always erroneous because aircraft released their pollutants within the troposphere and the lower stratosphere, whereas rockets are releasing their pollutants all the way from the surface of the Earth to the mesophere, and when pollution is released into those upper layers it lasts for a longer time than earthbound sources.”

The studies published so far by researchers such as Maloney and Marais tend to focus on Rocket Propellant-1, or RP-1, because this highly refined form of kerosene is one of the most popular rocket fuels. It helped blast iconic rockets such as the Saturn, Delta, Atlas, and Soyuz and, in the 21st Century, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Virgin Orbit’s horizontally launched rocket, into space. RP-1 is popular because it is cheaper, stable at room temperature and isn’t dangerously explosive. It also packs a lot of punch.

Last year there were more than 140 rocket launches around the world – but this is likely to grow substantially (Credit: Korea Aerospace Research Institute/Getty Images)

Marais and a team of researchers from University College London (UCL), the University of Cambridge and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used a 3D model to explore the impact on the atmosphere of rocket launches and re-entry in 2019, and the future impact of space tourism promoted by companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin.

Marais’s team found that black carbon emissions will more than double after just an additional three years of space tourism launches, and that particles emitted by rockets are almost 500 times more efficient at holding heat in the atmosphere than all other sources of soot combined, resulting in an enhanced warming climate effect. While current loss of ozone due to space launches is small, the impact of space tourism launches may undermine the recovery in the ozone layer experienced after the success of the 1987 Montreal Protocol which banned substances that deplete the Earth’s ozone layer.

When you have the cumulative effect of more launches, it is going to get interesting – Dimitris Drikakis

Maloney and his team calculated that each year rocket launches that use RP-1 collectively expel around 1 gigagram, or 1,000 metric tons, of black carbon into the stratosphere. Thanks to the growing number of rockets launched, this could reach 10 gigagrams a year in a couple of decades, along with a temperature rise in parts of the stratosphere of as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius, and a thinning of the ozone layer. If the amount of black carbon expelled into the atmosphere reach 30 gigagrams a year, or even 100, then there will be some cooling of the surface of the planet under this black carbon umbrella.

For their research paper, Ioannis Kokkinakis and Dimitris Drikakis, scientists at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus, used real rocket launch data from a Space X Falcon 9 rocket in 2016 to create the “first high-resolution and high-order computational model” of its kind to analyse in detail the impact of rocket emissions on the climate. This Space X launch was chosen because useful webcam footage of the exhaust gases was available. One of the “biggest surprises” they found is that in the first stage of the rocket launch around 116 tons of CO2 was emitted in 165 seconds. “That is quite significant,” says Drikakis. “Yes, we don’t know the actual impact on the atmosphere because atmospheric chemistry is a very complicated matter, but when you have the cumulative effect of more launches, it is going to get interesting.”

Orbex plan to launch rockets up to 12 times a year (Credit: Orbex)

Another discovery was that nitrogen oxides were formed from the heating of the atmospheric air by the hot rocket exhaust gases, and their impact at lower altitudes seems to depend on the design of the rocket nozzles. “This is important because rocket design can potentially mitigate this effect,” Drikakis says.

Every model makes assumptions for efficiency and due to the complex nature of the Earth’s atmosphere, and then undergoes rigorous validation. “If they’re all converging on a single story, then you can have fairly good confidence that they are on to something,” says Maloney.

Now there is a race on to develop alternatives to existing fuels like RP-1 and UDMH, and liquid methane appears to be in the lead. Several new rocket engines, including SpaceX’s Raptor and the European Space Agency’s Prometheus engine, have been designed to use this gas as a fuel because it has a higher performance than other fuels, meaning the rocket can be smaller and produce less soot when it’s launched. Its lower cost means the price of a rocket launch can be reduced, too.

Several rocket start-ups are at a relatively early stage of experimenting with sustainable alternatives to RP-1 made from waste plastic or biomass

Methane, however, is controversial because it is one of the worst gases as far as global warming is concerned. It is around 80 times more warming than carbon dioxide over its lifetime.

Several rocket start-ups are at a relatively early stage of experimenting with sustainable alternatives to RP-1 made from waste plastic or biomass. Such start-ups typically focus on the easier tasks of reducing their carbon footprint and protecting the environment around the space port, as well as the harder job of cutting emissions in the stratosphere. 

Orbex is a UK-based low-cost launch company with a rocket factory in Forres, near Inverness in Scotland. Orbex plans to launch its small rocket called Prime up to 12 times a year from Space Hub Sutherland in the far north of the country.

Launching rockets from air, as Virigin Orbit has been experimenting with, could be one alternative to conventional launches (Credit: Virgin Orbital)

The fuel its rocket runs on is bio-propane, a renewable biofuel created as a waste product from the production of biodiesel. Orbex’s rocket could end up with around 90% fewer emissions than an RP-1-fuelled launch. It should also produce less soot than rockets burning its kerosene cousin.

Virgin Orbit is looking into the use of sustainable rocket fuels.

The other option to reduce the industry’s atmospheric impact is to explore new ways of launching satellites, horizontally like Virgin Orbit, or even in a sling shot, as Nasa is exploring. Like a child’s toy, this will work by attaching a rocket payload to the end of a huge arm that will be accelerated by electric motors to very high speeds, flinging the rocket out into space.

People are starting to wake up to the disproportionate impact on the atmosphere of the space launch industry, but nothing happens in a hurry in space – Chris Larmour

Researchers fear that the space industry has little incentive to change because of the absence of regulations, a reluctance to abandon safe and proven technology, and the fact that new propellants mean expensive new engines and lengthy testing.

“People are starting to wake up to the disproportionate impact on the atmosphere of the space launch industry, but nothing happens in a hurry in space,” says Chris Larmour, co-founder and CEO of Orbex. “I definitely think we’ll see regulation coming in. The government will set an emissions target and we will have to adhere to it. The industry can lobby all they want, but in the end, it’s the politicians that make laws.”

Yet, others are weary of a regulatory solution to a complex problem. 

“One-size-fits-all solutions are very challenging given the broad range of technology types,” says Pomerantz. “However, technology innovation will be key. Propulsion technology is one part of that, but what is really needed is a holistic view of how we maximise the efficiency of full systems – what kind of spacecraft we build, what jobs they do, and how they get launched.”

The Comfortable Spot Podcast

I really enjoyed chatting to award-winning podcast producer Kenneth M Sweeney for The Comfortable Spot Podcast about some of the bigger issues that my critically acclaimed book N-4 DOWN the hunt for the Arctic airship Italia (Mariner Books/ HarperCollins) addresses…

Listen to it on

The Comfortable Spot website

Spotify

Apple Podcast

Find out more about N-4 DOWN

Read The Wall Street Journal review

Read The Forbes review

Read the New York Journal of Books review

See my talk about N-4 DOWN for New York’s famous The Explorer’s Club here.

Listen to my interview with CBS radio here.

Notes

3:45 why people are fascinated by polar stories

4:55 the realization that science cannot help you in the Arctic

6:00 the story behind N-4 DOWN

7:00 the Fascist connection

9:00 legacy of Umberto Nobile

10:22 the role of Roald Amundsen in the story

12:50 the comparison of Umberto Nobile’s leadership with Scott and Shackleton

20:50 the big egos and technology rivalries of the 2020s compared to the 1920s

29:00 what we can learn from the story of N-4 DOWN

“

The giant hangar poised for an aviation revolution

Airships could offer a much cleaner and quieter alternative for some aspects of the aviation market. In a former airship factory, a new generation are taking shape.

Read my latest feature for BBC Future in full below, or the original by clicking on this link.

Sergey Brin turned internet search into one of the world’s most valuable businesses more than two decades ago. Now he intends to improve a technology which had its heyday long before he was born…

Brin and his team of engineers’ plan is to do this by reinventing a much older, if improved technology. A new generation of airships – the lighter-than-air craft that don’t need conventional airports – will be built in a corner of Ohio which played a unique part in the history of aviation. What’s more, if built they will be housed in one of America’s most iconic structures, the Goodyear Airdock in Akron.

Airships could help speed up the delivery of aid in disaster zones, carry air cargo much more cheaply than air freighters, and cut aviation emissions. However, similar projects in the past have struggled to overcome the complex engineering challenges involved, and have either run out of money, or left potential customers disillusioned.

“Flying an airship is unlike flying any other aircraft because it’s lighter than air and floats, instead of sinks, when you put the power at idle,” says Andrea Deyling, a pilot and director of airship operations of Brin’s airship company, LTA Research. “There’s also a sense of wonder people have when they see a lighter-than-air vehicle flying overhead. LTA Research is building a unique airship and I can’t wait to get into the actual aircraft and fly it.”

In the first half of the 20th Century, Akron in Ohio, was known as the “rubber capital of the world” because it was home to great American tyre manufacturers such as one time arch-rivals Goodyear and Firestone, and it soon became a centre of airship development thanks to the connections between the two industries.

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Even though these industries have since declined, their legacy remains. Around 14 miles (22km) south of the city, Goodyear built an airship base at Wingfoot Lake in 1917 that, over 100 years later, still constructs and maintains the company’s blimp fleet. This makes it the oldest airship facility in the world, and one of the oldest active aircraft bases.

Similarly, Akron University grew on the back of the tyre and airship manufacturing industry, and its College of Engineering and Polymer Science is one of the top faculties of its kind in the United States. The cluster of businesses that have grown up around it has even led to the area’s being labelled “Polymer Valley”.

The Goodyear-Zeppelin Airdock, to use its original name, was designed in a wind tunnel, looked like it belonged in Flash Gordon, and when was built in 1929, it was the largest building in the world without interior supports. Incredibly the $2.2m structure, equivalent to around $30m (£25m) today took only seven months to build.

Germany was a pioneer in using airships as long-range passenger aircraft (Credit: De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images)

It is not possible to see the Airdock from the centre of Akron. Instead, you need to drive out of the city, past the university and on to the freeway. Then this giant black building appears in front of you, like a buried half-cylinder with two scallop shells at either end. Its true size is hard to comprehend, even once you get inside.

This giant airship factory with a floor space equivalent to eight American football fields (364,000 sq ft or 34 000 sq m) was the vision of two men, Paul W Litchfield, and Dr Karl Arnstein. The former was the first CEO of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, who spearheaded its tie-up with the German Zeppelin Company to build airships. The latter became one of the most important airship designers in the 20th Century thanks to his work for Goodyear.  

Litchfield had the vision. He built the Airdock because he wanted to construct a new generation of huge, state-of-the-art helium-filled rigid American airships for long-distance commercial passenger flights, and to position Goodyear as the world’s leading manufacturer of passenger-carrying airships. Rigid airships are given their shape by the complex metal framework needed to support a huge envelope filled with enough hydrogen or helium to lift a sizeable number of passengers, or cargo, for days at a time. The contracts he signed with the US Navy to build the USS Akron and USS Macon, the world’s first flying aircraft carriers and two of the largest aircraft ever flown, would subsidise the research and development needed for these passenger craft.

Civil servants in London drew up plans to unite the British Empire through a fleet of giant airships

This wasn’t as mad it seemed. In the 1920s the future of long-distance aviation seemed to be the airship. In 1919 the British R-34 had flown across the Atlantic and back. In 1928 the Graf Zeppelin made its first transatlantic demonstration flight from Germany to Lakehurst, New Jersey; a regular commercial service to Brazil soon followed.

Civil servants in London drew up plans to unite the British Empire through a fleet of giant airships. Goodyear joined the race too, setting up its own companies to identify routes across the Atlantic and Pacific.

“Litchfield was worried that the British were going to beat him to this global airship service, and he watched what they did very closely,” says John J Geoghegan, journalist and author of the book When Giants Ruled the Sky. “He knew that once they opened up a route to Canada, that North America wasn’t going to be far behind.”

The USS Akron was one of the largest US airships built in Akron in the 1930s (Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

Arnstein was supposed to be the conservative one. Yet the Zeppelin designer tore up the book by choosing a radical curved design based on a hangar built in Dresden in 1913. This half-cylinder form with its shell-shaped doors helped eliminate the vortices that more traditional, rectangular structures can create – whirling masses of air that made moving giant airships in and out of hangars such a risky business. He later used a similar design for Hangar One in California.

The USS Akron was the first airship built in the Airdock. It was three times as long as a modern Airbus 380 but only half as wide. The christening of the ship in the hangar on 8 August 1931 was a national event. The First Lady, Lou Henry Hoover, was the ship’s sponsor and aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart flew in for the occasion. The New York Times said between 80,000 and 100,000 people attended the event which was broadcast on national radio.

Two years later, it was the turn of its sister ship, the USS Macon, to be christened. “The Macon and the Akron were tremendous achievements,” says Geoghegan. “These aircraft could fly for days at a time without stopping, carrying an 80-man crew, providing them with every amenity they needed to stay aloft. It made perfect strategic sense in the days before radar to have an airship scout the Pacific.”

The problem was the technology did not match their vision – John J Geoghegan

Unfortunately, neither ship would survive long enough to prevent the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. While the German zeppelins flew for 19 years without a single loss of life, the US Navy flew their ships more aggressively. On 4 April 1933, the Akron flew into a terrible storm off the coast of New England and broke up, with 73 dead. On 12 February 1935 the Macon ran into a storm off Point Sur, California, and crashed into the sea, with the loss of two men.

“The problem was the technology did not match their vision,” says Geoghegan, “and their engineers did not have materials that were robust enough to withstand the conditions they would encounter in flying; nor did they have a sufficient understanding of the forces acting on an airship.”

Thankfully, nearly 100 years later, we do.

The new generation of airships will be built with more modern materials than their 1930s counterparts (Credit: LTA)

It is hard to avoid the parallels between Goodyear’s first CEO and Google’s co-founder, who has reportedly been fascinated by lighter-than-air flight for years. Google’s corporate jets flew out of the Nasa’s Moffett Field in California, part of Nasa’s Ames Research Center, and home to Hangar One, built to house the Macon. In 2012, Brin appeared to take a lot of interest in a modern semi-rigid Zeppelin NT (New Technology) airship flying tourist flights from the airfield. One year later, his interest had grown enough for him to decide to build his own airship, and that year LTA Research Ltd was founded, with Alan Weston, previously director of programs at Nasa’s Ames Research Center, appointed CEO.

The project quickly picked up momentum. In 2017, LTA leased space in the Macon’s old hangar from Alphabet (formerly Google), and around the same time research work began at the Akron Airdock. A 12-engine 50ft-long (15m) electric “baby airship” began flight testing at Akron.

While helium will provide the lift, for the first-time hydrogen fuel cells will power an airship to help it achieve net zero emissions

Meanwhile, work started at Moffett Field on LTA’s first and smallest airship, Pathfinder 1, which is a rigid design close to twice the length of a jumbo jet. In 2021 LTA leased the Airdock. This enabled tests to start in the Airdock on section of a larger model, Pathfinder 3. LTA now wants to purchase the hangar.  

While other airship manufacturers and promoters have distanced themselves from the history of the airship, it is clear from the blueprints of the Akron used on the LTA website homepage that the airship start-up embraces its past. One of Weston’s first stops as CEO was the last place airships were manufactured in the USA, and he spent a week in the archive of the University of Akron.

“Because of our predecessors’ early work, LTA is working to manufacture airships that are safer, faster, more environmentally friendly, and more capable than ever before,” he says.

Driven in part by the same desire to access deep knowledge about the airship industry, LTA has been working with University of Akron’s College of Engineering and Polymer Science since 2017. The researchers are working on the different components needed for the airships, using 3D printers to manufacture and test them. They built the baby airships as testbeds for the technology.

Nowadays, would-be airship pilots can train in a flight simulator which mimics the aircraft’s handling qualities (Credit: LTA)

While helium will provide the lift, for the first-time hydrogen fuel cells will power an airship to help it achieve net zero emissions.

In 1930 the men building the Akron had to work at the top of swaying 85ft-high (26m) ladders. In 2022, a massive cradle-like structure dubbed the Roller Coaster allows workers to stay on the ground while the giant ships are slowly rotated, allowing airships to be built more safely and quickly than before.

LTA is also starting to construct Pathfinder 3 while it is finishing Pathfinder 1.

“We have been encouraged to fail fast and fail often to learn as much as possible,” says Jillian Hilenski, a mechanical engineer working on the project.

As Zeppelin engineers did 100 years ago, they have come to Moffett Field and Akron to work with the Americans, and supply equipment such as fins, rudders, and material for a passenger gondola to LTA.

Plenty of challenges remain. No one has built airships like these for decades. Then there is the safe integration of new technology into designs with an eye to mass production, supply chain disruption since the Covid-19 pandemic began, and the need for skilled workers to grow. The long list of vacancies on their website is proof of that.

It was a dark building with no lights on and now the lights are on again – Daniel Horrigan

Then there is the bigger challenge: are there enough people in the 21st Century who want to buy an airship to rebuild an industry?

For now, airship hangars like the Airdock are all that remains of the brief golden age of the airship, drawing people with their massive size and their poignant sense of history – or a faint echo of the 30 years at the turn of the 20th Century when airships dominated books, magazines, movies, art, and design. It might be they represent a what-if moment in the development of our civilisation when technology might have taken a very different route.

“I think it is due to their vastness,” says @CardingtonSheds, a blogger trying to protect the sheds from property developers. “You can see Cardington [airship hangars or sheds] from miles away, dominating the flat countryside like industrial cathedrals.”

In the end for the people of Akron the arrival of Brin’s LTA in the Airdock means that a piece of their history is starting to be used again. “It was a dark building with no lights on and now the lights are on again,” says Akron mayor Daniel Horrigan, who as a child played football next to the stadium. “And there is now an amazing amount of activity.”

Pathfinder 1 is expected to fly later this year. Pathfinder 3, next year.

Ultimately, there is something incredibly profound about the rise, fall, and – maybe – rise again of the airship.  “What if after the Apollo 1 fire and disaster we said, ‘Well, this is just too dangerous, we’re not going to do it?'” says Geoghegan. “Not all these types of efforts are going to succeed, but we’re better off for this striving.”

* Mark Piesing is the author of the book N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia, published by HarperCollins.

Get Lost Podcast: The Hunt for Arctic airship Italia

I was really chuffed when I was invited on to the award-winning Get Lost podcast to talk about my new book N-4 DOWN: The hunt for the Arctic airship Italia.

The Get Lost Podcast was one of Adweek’s Podcasts of the Year for 2020

I hope you enjoy listening to it, as much as I did doing it.

Find out what the critics are saying about N-4 DOWN here.

Polar explorers venture from Italy to the North Pole in a zeppelin during 1928, but the trip doesn’t go as planned. Author Mark Piesing joins us to bring one of polar exploration’s most harrowing tales of disaster and rescue back to life. Piesing talks about his book, N-4 Down: The Hunt for Arctic Airship Italia and special guest host Meredith Edwards (Meredith for Real: The Curious Introvert) takes the reigns of the show.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Android

Listen on Spotify

Great news! My 2nd piece for The Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine has been formally accepted.

I have some great news!
I always wanted to write for The Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine. Now my 2nd feature article has just been accepted for publication. I can’t tell you what it is about, but I can say that it’s a long read and it is about somewhere rather chilly. 

Here again, is the first piece I wrote for Air and Space. I even dragged my wife, kids and dog around the New Forest looking for a forgotten WW2 airfield to research it. 
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/across-channel-nazi-helicopter-180977810/

The epic attempts to power planes with hydrogen

During the Cold War, both the US and USSR researched liquid hydrogen as a way to fuel aircraft. Could this cleaner fuel finally be around the corner?

Read my latest, and well-received, feature for BBC Future in full below, or by clicking on this link.

Few of the thousands of tourists who visit West Palm Beach, Florida, every year for its beaches notice the abandoned industrial site on the edge of town. A faded sign reading “CAMERAS FIREARMS NOT PERMITTED ON THIS PROPERTY” was attached to a gate blocking a forgotten access road. It was one of the few clues that the Apix Fertilizer factory once hid a secret….

The 10-square-mile (25.9 sq km) site was a clandestine government facility that, in the late 1950s, was at the heart of American efforts to spy on the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

Rather than producing fertiliser for farmers, the site was probably the world’s largest producer of liquid hydrogen, which was needed for one thing: Project Suntan. This was the code name given to the “beyond top-secret” project to build the replacement for the Lockheed U-2 spy plane, which began in 1956. 

The Lockheed CL-400 Suntan was more like a space plane, or a Thunderbird, than a spy plane. Led by Lockheed’s genius designer and secretive Skunk Works founder Kelly Johnson, the dartlike flying machine was intended to fly at Mach 2.5 at 30,000m (100,000ft) with a skin temperature of 177ºC (350ºF), have a range of 4,800km (3,000 miles) and be powered by liquid hydrogen – that is, hydrogen cooled down to cryogenic temperatures of around -423ºF (-253C). The Skunk Works, based in Burbank California, was a business-within-a-business that was free of the usual corporate oversight.

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The electric plane leading a revolution Can Brazil bring back the airship? The hydrogen revolution in the skies

Engineers believed they were in a “hydrogen race” against the Soviets after U-2 flights over the Soviet Union spotted the construction of liquid hydrogen plants. The Americans became convinced that the Soviets were developing their own space plane/spy plane, or a high-flying, high-speed interceptor to shoot down the U-2. The true Soviet motivation became clear in 1957, when Sputnik was launched on top of a liquid hydrogen-powered rocket.

Even though aspects of the project were a success, the Skunk Works team was unable to solve two problems with hydrogen-powered aircraft which still confront designers today. The first was range. Hydrogen is very light compared to kerosene – traditional aviation fuel – and packs three times as much punch per unit of mass, but it needs four times the volume on an aircraft for the same hit, and storing it is tricky.

The Lockheed CL-400 was Lockheed’s ambitious design from Project Suntan (Credit: Lockheed)

Liquid hydrogen has advantages over the alternative, pressurised hydrogen gas, which include a higher energy density (vital for longer ranges) and not needing strong, heavy tanks. Nonetheless, while Johnson’s design for Project Suntan was as long as a B-52 bomber, it still couldn’t achieve the range Johnson had promised the US Air Force.

The second problem was even greater. While it proved possible to produce enough liquid hydrogen, the infrastructure needed to run a hydrogen-powered plane was a different matter. Kerosene was just too cheap and convenient compared to transporting volatile liquid hydrogen in huge amounts to air bases around the world, storing it, and safely refuelling the aircraft.

When the Lockheed team stored hundreds of gallons of liquid hydrogen at the Skunk Works a visiting scientist warned them “My God … you’re going to blow up Burbank.” Later, they were reminded of this prophecy when a fire broke out and nearly caused a massive explosion that could have demolished the top-secret facility, the neighbouring airport and Burbank itself.

Now a new generation of engineers is pursuing hydrogen-powered flight with greater urgency, spurred on by its promise of zero carbon emissions

With his famous bluntness, in 1958 Johnson told his paymasters in Washington that he was “building them a dog”, and repaid around $90m spent on the project. The hydrogen-powered plane became one of the few failures of his long career. It was easy to think that if Johnson and his Skunkworks couldn’t make the new fuel work, no one could.

Several other aircraft engineers disagreed. On 15 April 1988 the rather mundane-looking Soviet experimental aircraft the Tupolev Tu-155 flew using liquid hydrogen, and the modified airliner went on to fly around 100 flights. The fall of the Soviet Union curtailed the programme, but a handful of hydrogen-powered small planes or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have flown since then. The prototype of Boeing’s Phantom Eye high-altitude, long-endurance, liquid hydrogen-powered drone flew for the first time on 1 June 2012. On the last of its nine flights the Phantom Eye flew for eight to nine hours at 16,500m (54,000ft). A lack of funding eventually grounded the drone.

Now a new generation of engineers is pursuing hydrogen-powered flight with greater urgency, spurred on by its promise of zero carbon emissions. (The aviation industry is currently responsible for around 2.4% of global carbon emissions.)

Visionary designer Kelly Johnson looked into hydrogen aircraft designs in the 1960s (Credit: Golding/Getty Images)

Most of these designs generate electricity by either using liquid hydrogen to power a fuel cell or to combust in an engine, or a combination of the two. With hydrogen comes the opportunity to rethink aircraft design, including the wings, because of the need to store liquid hydrogen in relatively heavy, insulated tanks. That might make future aircraft look a lot different, because lighter kerosene can be stored in the wings. It is also a chance to rethink practices that in some case date to the 1950s.

“When a process hasn’t been innovated for a very long time you can end up with malfunctions in the design,” says Arlette van der Veer, senior manager radical innovation at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. “For example, my colleagues from cargo, or ground services, are the last point in the aircraft design process, and that is a huge problem. They are currently lying on their backs in the belly of planes moving luggage because robots can’t go into the space, and it is too narrow for other solutions.”

Full-sized, the Flying-V would be around the same size as an Airbus A350

In July 2020 a team from Delft University drove across the border from the Netherlands to Fassberg air base in Lower Saxony, Germany, on a mission to test a radical new design of hydrogen-powered commercial aircraft called the Flying-V. In the back of their van was a 3m-wide (10ft) scale model in the distinctive blue-and-white KLM livery. The team – including researchers, engineers, and a drone pilot – had a week to prove that their one-and-a-half years of hard work in the university’s aerospace laboratory had not been a waste of time.

Delft is one of the top technical universities in the world and has one of the largest aerospace engineering faculties in northern Europe. The Flying-V was conceived by TU Berlin student Justus Benad, supported by KLM and Airbus. It is a radical new design that is 20% more efficient than a conventional aircraft, with the passenger cabin, cargo hold and fuel tanks integrated into the two arms of its V-shaped structure. Full-sized, the Flying-V would be around the same size as an Airbus A350, carry a similar number of passengers (more than 300) and could use the same departure gates.

Soviet designers flew a converted Tu-154 airliner with hydrogen fuel in the 1980s (Credit: Joker/Getty Images)

The Flying-V is a type of aircraft called a “blended wing” because the wings and fuselage are smoothly blended, with no clear dividing line. Often called flying wings, they are seen as a natural fit for hydrogen-powered aircraft because they are more efficient than traditional tube-and-wing aircraft and have plenty of space for the hydrogen tanks.

Airbus itself has unveiled three Zeroe concepts for liquid hydrogen-powered aircraft, one of which could enter service by 2035. They are a rather conventional-looking short-haul turboprop and an intercontinental jet airliner, as well as a more radical blended wing that looks more like a space plane.

FlyZero, a British project aiming to realise zero-emissions commercial aviation, assessed 27 different configurations for hydrogen-powered airliners before producing its own. These included planes with two fuselages, one for hydrogen and one for passengers, through to gondola designs, with the tanks above the passengers, and a flying wing. Its own, recently unveiled concept, is for a mid-sized aircraft flying non-stop to San Francisco or Delhi which looks like a bloated version of a conventional airliner with ultra-thin wings.

Aircraft design is a compromise between many things, and you can get into get into a spiral when designing a plane – David Debney

There are many other designs for future hydrogen-powered commercial aircraft. “It is a question of where you can site these hydrogen tanks in an aircraft for the minimum penalty,” says David Debney, a chief engineer at FlyZero. “We looked at wacky ideas, for example, where you could put a giant hydrogen tank between the wings and have two cabins, one at the back, one at the front, but they’d be separate. And you couldn’t get from one to the other. That’s not allowed under the regulations.

“Aircraft design is a compromise between many things, and you can get into get into a spiral when designing a plane. If you make it heavier, then you need more lift, and that means a bigger wing; a bigger wing means more weight, so you need even more lift but a bigger wing weighs more, and so on.”

The Flying-V was designed in a completely different way to most aircraft concepts (Credit: Flying-V)

For the Flying-V, hydrogen means trade-offs that Kelly Johnson would have recognised, and which the kerosene powered version doesn’t need. “We sacrificed two things: the first is about two-thirds of the cargo volume [which will hit profitability],” says Roelof Vos, an assistant professor at the Aerospace Engineering Faculty of Delft University of Technology. He is also technical lead on the project. “We will have sufficient volume for the passengers’ luggage, but nothing more. The second is the amount of volume we have available for hydrogen, and how far we can fly on that.” While a hydrogen-powered Flying-V could fly from London to Cape Town non-stop, a kerosene-powered version could reach as far as Sydney.

On 16 July 2020 the Delft team’s hard work paid off. The scale model of the Flying-V was carried through the doors of the old wartime hangar onto the concrete apron at Fassberg. A little after 3.30pm, with a whine of its two electric motors, it rose sharply into the air for its successful five-minute-long maiden flight. “The flight of the scale model demonstrates that the Flying-V can be flown controllably with good handling qualities without any problems,” says Vos.

“Hydrogen aircraft have flown now, so we know the fundamentals of the fuel, and we know the fundamentals of the aircraft,” says Mark Bentall, head of operations for technology at Airbus, “and like we do with a traditionally fuelled aircraft… we will always take the benefit of the latest technologies.”

Thanks to computer modelling our level of understanding of combustion is way, way more advanced than in Kelly Johnson’s day – David Debney

Carbon fibre allows engineers to build lighter, stronger structures. Easily overlooked new manufacturing techniques such as friction stir welding (FSW) deliver more accurate high-quality joins. It uses the heat generated by friction from a rotating tool to fuse two different materials together. The Skunk Works team used wooden models and wind tunnels to design Suntan; today computer design and simulation tools help engineers to produce highly accurate designs, quickly and cheaply.

“Thanks to computer modelling our level of understanding of combustion is way, way more advanced than in Kelly Johnson’s day, and this has helped kerosene engines, but it will help hydrogen-powered aircraft more,” says David Debney. “Greater efficiency of aircraft helps massively with the volume of hydrogen fuel that you need to accommodate, and that’s the big thing that’s changed.

“If you were using 1950s aerodynamics and engine technology, for the same missions you’d need a lot more hydrogen, and that’s hugely penalising from the volume perspective.”

FlyZero has offered three different airliner coincepts, including a smaller model for regional journeys (Credit: FlyZero)

The innovation continues. Ultima Forma is a British technology company based south of London. Fuel tanks are heavy. Hydrogen causes corrosion embrittlement in metals such as steel, but less so in copper. Ultima Forma is developing ultra-thin liners made from copper for the inside of lightweight carbon-fibre fuel tanks. The same technology could be used in the transportation of hydrogen.

It is in everyone’s interest, as well as the planet’s, if the lessons learned by different teams could be shared. “I know for sure that the best design cannot come from one party,” says Arlette van der Veer. “What would be really disruptive is an open knowledge-sharing economy to combine the knowledge of different manufacturers to produce the best designs.”

Crucially, commercial aviation will have to learn from other industries that work with hydrogen every day

Even though an estimated $500bn (£370bn) is going to be spent globally on hydrogen infrastructure, not every problem that Johnson faced has been solved, and some – including whether the hydrogen is produced locally or centrally, how it is distributed and how it is stored at the airport – are far too big for an aircraft manufacturer or airline to solve on its own.

Then there is the matter of how aircraft will be refuelled with passengers nearby (robotic arms are one idea), and what the safety regulations will be. “That’s a big bit of work,” says Captain David Morgan, director of flight operations at budget airline easyJet. “And that’s something we’re going to start doing long before the first aeroplane arrives on the scene.”

Crucially, commercial aviation will have to learn from other industries that work with hydrogen every day. “One of the reasons why we brought Zeroe to public attention early was because we need to work as an ecosystem to make it happen,” says Bentall. Conversations between airports, airlines and manufacturers have started.

Tests with the model Flying-V showed that it had good handling qualities, Roelof Vos says (Credit: Flying-V)

There are many reasons why it might not happen, but there are good indications that sometime in the 2030s commercially viable hydrogen-powered aircraft will be in the air, though initially they might look like the planes that line up at airports like Heathrow today.

“There are some really interesting designs, futuristic designs, that would lend themselves to hydrogen,” says Morgan. “However, what you don’t want to do when you change over to a hydrogen fleet is to make everything so radical that the changeover becomes a real problem.”

“Safety is the sole purpose of everything we do… but what I discovered in my research is that there are some mindsets and approaches from the 1960s or 1970s that still prevail today despite all the new testing methods,” says van der Veer. “If I designed the most perfect aircraft…but there is no fuselage, it’s not cylindrical, it would be a case of the computer says ‘no’. The certification authorities need to develop certification methods for aircraft designs that they have never seen before.”

How the UK is making its way back into the space race

The Black Arrow R3 lifts off from Woomera, Australia, October 28th 1971. The launch marked the first flight of a British-built rocket and a British-built satellite. Due to the amount of peroxide in the fuel mixture, the exhaust was almost invisible. PHOTOGRAPH BY ROYAL AIRCRAFT ESTABLISHMENT / MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY

Britain is the only country to have ever voluntarily given up its own independent space launch capability after having developed it. Here is how the UK is going to get it back.

Read my latest piece for Raconteur that was published inside The Times in full below, or by clicking on this link.

Download the full Future of Infrastructure 2022 report published in association with The Times here. https://bit.ly/3jkdKow

The UK is a world-leading centre for satellite manufacturing and data analysis, with one missing element: its own satellite launch capability. That is about to change. 

From Spaceport Cornwall to the SaxaVord Spaceport on Shetland, private companies and entrepreneurs are leading the way to build the spaceports needed to position the UK as a centre for the satellite launch industry. The UK government’s goal is to grow the UK’s share of the global market for space from 5.1% to 10% by 2030, and in so doing, earn the UK’s new spaceports around £4.2 billion in launch revenues. 

There are now more than 4,800 satellites in Earth’s orbit, 1,800 more than last year. Elon Musk’s SpaceX alone hopes to deploy nearly 15 times that number just for its satellite internet service. 

It is important for us to be able to drive to the spaceport in a couple of hours rather than have a long logistical chain

The burgeoning industry has led to a rocket renaissance. In 2021, a total of 144 orbital launches took place, of which a record 133 were successful. Spaceports are now proposed in countries from the US to Indonesia. 

“We are one of the biggest manufacturers of small satellites across the world, but we don’t have the capability to launch,” says Matthew Archer, commercial spaceflight director at the UK Space Agency. With demand growing rapidly, particularly for the launch of small satellites, there’s a real commercial opportunity, he says, with the government able to help industry grab a slice. 

“This will give the UK an end-to-end supply chain, which we know from surveys is what customers want,” he says. “It is also about the UK to a degree developing strategic independence by having our own capability.”

National importance

The refusal of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos to launch a Soyuz rocket carrying 36 OneWeb satellites due to Britain’s “hostile stance towards Russia” has highlighted the danger of relying on other nations to launch UK satellites. OneWeb is a global satellite internet access company in which the UK government has a large stake.

Chris Larmour is co-founder and CEO of Orbex, a UK-based low-cost launch company with a rocket factory in Forres, near Inverness. Orbex plans to launch a rocket up to 12 times a year from a single launchpad at the £17.3m Space Hub Sutherland in the far north of Scotland, providing the spaceport with vital income.

For Larmour, it’s vital that the UK has its own spaceports. “It is important for us to be able to drive to the spaceport in a couple of hours rather than have a long logistical chain that involves flying or shipping,” he says. “If there weren’t spaceports in the UK, we’d have to go overseas to Norway or Sweden or French Guiana to launch these rockets, and that destroys the cost model for a rocket of this scale.” 

When the public hear the word “spaceport”, they may imagine something vast like Cape Canaveral. The UK’s proposed spaceports are much smaller. SaxaVord will have three launchpads on the Lamba Ness peninsula on Unst in Shetland and cost £43m, rising to £100m over five years.

While Sutherland will launch rockets only from a single partner, SaxaVord will generate revenue from several, including UK-based Skyrora, as well as Lockheed Martin and its rocket technology partner ABL Space Systems, which intend to launch the UK and Europe’s first vertical-launched satellite in 2022 for the government’s Pathfinder programme. 

These sites plan to launch mini or micro rockets the old-fashioned way: vertically, like the rockets that blast off from Cape Canaveral, as opposed to horizontally, when they are launched from an aircraft.

They’re around the same size as an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) rather than one of Elon Musk’s much longer Falcon 9 workhorses, because they are designed to carry small satellites and nanosatellites into the low Earth orbit needed for customers like OneWeb and SpaceX’s Starlink, as well as for Earth observation.

The northern latitudes of these spaceports make it easier to launch such satellites, which are intended for polar orbit. They can do so safely, surrounded as they are by the sea and sparsely populated areas.

At the other end of the country, Spaceport Cornwall plans to launch satellites horizontally up to 12 times a year by 2030 from rocket-carrying planes like Virgin Orbit’s Boeing 747. The planes will take off and land on the existing runway at Newquay airport, alongside budget airlines ferrying tourists to and from the Cornish holiday resort. 

Government support

What is the UK government’s role in establishing spaceports? Initially, it seemed set to select national champions from several competing bids. This competition was then cancelled in favour of a licensing system, through which many spaceports will be established, whether for horizontal or vertical launches. 

The government supported this by putting up over £40m in grants, including £2.5m to help develop Sutherland, £5.5m to Orbex for a new rocket, £23.5m to Lockheed Martin to establish launch operations at SaxaVord and build and test a new space vehicle, and £7.5m to support a launch by Virgin Orbit from Spaceport Cornwall.

“The government sets a target for building a native launch industry and provides some encouraging funding to get that done,” says Larmour. “Not all the funding, but seed grants of a few million pounds, which is not a lot in space launch, but it’s enough to get companies moving and acts as a seal of approval that means investors take them seriously.”

This hands-off approach to spaceports led to the 2018 Space Industry Act and the launch of the UK’s spaceflight programme. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) approves licences. Instead of a fixed-risk threshold for operators to meet, companies in the UK must demonstrate that they have considered the risks and have, as much as reasonably possible, taken appropriate precautions to minimise them.

“The UK government wants a balance between competition, access to US [customers], attracting known providers and building a UK launch capability,” says Archer. The US and UK governments signed a ground-breaking technology safeguards agreement to protect export-controlled technologies on American vehicles when flown from British spaceports.

The central government “owns” space policy. However, devolved governments like Scotland – as well as local councils – see spaceports and their ecosystems as opportunities for their communities and will offer help accordingly. Even a spaceport the size of Sutherland will provide about 40 jobs.

In the UK, the government views spaceports as a commercial endeavour. It believes the government’s job is to de-risk the initial investment and kickstart a market that might not otherwise exist to the same extent.

“There are opportunities for multiple spaceports, each with their own niche, but if there isn’t the demand, there will be consolidation,” Archer notes.

That said, the UK government isn’t willing to see the whole industry disappear. 

“No,” Archer says. “That is one thing that we will continue to monitor and test. It is part of the regular conversation we have with Cornwall, Shetland, and Sutherland. We have a good deal of confidence in those projects. For the others, it is a developing business case that we are continuing to see.”

Future plans

In the future, the government hasn’t ruled out the development of more powerful rockets that can lift heavier payloads into orbit, but a heavy launch capability would require a great deal more involvement.

“It’s one thing we have looked at and we continue to keep under review, but it’s a significant undertaking, and it’s not a commercial market,” Archer says. “For now, the strategic ambition isn’t there.”

In the end, building a spaceport is relatively simple; running one is not.

“I know the civil engineers won’t thank me for saying this, but the actual build is relatively simple,” says Scott Hammond, chief operating officer of SaxaVord Spaceport. It’s about building concrete launch pads and industrial sheds. The hard part is the global nature of the business.

“When we launch, we may have to monitor the rockets and look at all the safety aspects out to 5,000 nautical miles from Shetland. The drop zones for some of our stages are likely to be up by Greenland.”

The UK has never launched an orbital rocket from its home soil. That could change this year, potentially turning the country into a leading player in satellite launch and restoring a capability it gave up 60 years ago.