MAGGIE PAGANO: Now watch that Girl go – UK space industry set to lift off

Get ready for the start of the UK space industry on Monday night. At around 10.16pm, a repurposed jumbo 747, named Cosmic Girl, will launch from Newquay with nine satellites under its wing.

Cosmic Girl will then fly west from Cornwall to Cork in Ireland, where the jumbo will fire the rocket – known as LauncherOne – at an altitude of 10,000 meters to send the satellites deep into space. They will then be deposited at an altitude of about 340 miles and orbit the Earth.

It will be a historic mission for Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit team as it will be the first time a rocket carrying satellites has been launched from the UK.

Until now, British firms, the world leaders in making satellites, had to send them to overseas spaceports to get them off the ground. But now that Spaceport Cornwall is ready for action, the UK can launch its own products, which is why it’s such a big milestone for the space industry.

It also means that the UK aerospace industry will become even more attractive to overseas companies and open up new partnerships between countries and governments. That’s it, says Spaceport boss Melissa Thorpe. Spaceport is already seeing the benefits of the new launch pad, which is ready for action with a new R&D center and workshops opening in March.

Part-funded by the UK Space Agency, this latest Virgin Orbit launch is being conducted in conjunction with the US National Reconnaissance Office. They send out satellites primarily for military intelligence gathering and security purposes – such as listening to radio transmissions from ships – for both the British and US governments.

One of the satellites going up is also Wales’ first-ever satellite, created by Cardiff start-up Space Forge, which is experimenting with components for future mini-orbital factories. In addition to the obvious military and telecommunications applications, satellites are increasingly being used in a variety of civilian applications for research in the healthcare, agribusiness and transportation sectors, as well as for weather forecasting and climate data.

Some satellites carry crop seeds to see how they adapt to high altitudes and different temperatures, while others are used to test how certain drugs – and viruses and bacteria – survive or adapt to the extremes of space. All useful information for when humans are ready to live on Mars.

Much of this work is carried out on the Harwell campus, near Oxford. Known as the UK’s space gateway – and the largest in Europe – it is the most amazing place. On a visit a few years ago, I saw firsthand the work being done at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which has been involved in more than 200 space missions.

Here they test the satellites in purpose-built test chambers to verify that satellites and their equipment can survive the thrust of space.

Next door, at the Satellite Applications Catapult, you could see images beamed down from satellites – from all the ships traveling around the world to the smacks of jellyfish off the British coast.

All this has practical purposes. The images from the ships allow researchers to identify which are legally registered or not, while some years ago EDF was able to detect that it was jellyfish blocking its nuclear reactors at Torness.

Even more amazing was the Diamond Light Source, the UK’s only synchrotron and one of only 50 in the world, costing £500 million to build. It is used to shed light on the origin of the solar system. The professor in charge showed me dust particles harvested from the Wild 2 comet, a huge snowball of dirty ice and rock hurtling through space some 242 meters miles away. Mind blowing stuff.

The implications of all this research are huge – from understanding the universe to being big business. It is estimated that in a few years Britain’s aerospace industry will be worth £40bn – a tenth of the world market – with thousands of new jobs. There are now about 40,000 people working in space and another 100,000 indirectly.

Yet there is a downside to man’s quest to conquer the final frontier: space debris or space debris. It’s something you can see on the Harwell screens, bits and pieces of metal flying through space. There are thought to be 19,000 satellites trapped in space.

Ironically, one of the biggest projects engineers are working on is finding ways to bring those satellites back to Earth. What goes up usually comes down. But not in space.