When British space firm Skyrora started designing its first rocket five years ago, it had no idea where it would launch it.
The UK has never sent a rocket into space from home turf. Every British satellite currently in orbit has left the planet from foreign soil — often blasting off from somewhere in America, or Kourou in French Guiana, or Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Lee Rosen, Skyrora’s chief operations officer, said: “We really didn’t know where we were going to be able to launch from.” Necessity, as is so often the case, was the mother of invention. Skyrora, based in Edinburgh, started developing a “spaceport in a box” — a mobile launch system which can be packed into a dozen shipping containers and taken
