Whisper it, but Scotland is on the verge of becoming a space superpower | Robin McKie

Despite the demise of Virgin Orbit, the UK’s first spaceports should open in 2024

‘Yesterday afternoon, shattering the moorland peace of Inverard, in North Argyll, powered jets burst into action. For the second time in two months a space ship took off, its fiery trail vanishing wisp-like into the blue autumn sky.”

Thus Angus MacVicar began his novel Return to the Lost Planet, with words that have stayed with me since its publication in 1954 and its later serialisation by the BBC. Scotland was here depicted as an international centre of rocketry, with its glens and hills regularly reverberating to the sound of missions blasting their way to other worlds, in this case “the lost planet” of Hesikos.

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