The Royal Engineers built a small air strip on Unst, that's still used by Loganair, I think. There aren't any railways on the Shetlands, AFAIK, just ferry links between the islands. There's an airport at Sumburgh, just about as far away from Unst as it's possible to get, at the Southern end of the mainland. Transport links to Lerwick were pretty good during the oil boom, so no real problem getting big and heavy stuff as far as there, although there may be challenges getting stuff from there up to the northern end of Unst.

Galileo - is an EU vanity project which will be overtaken by technology developments.

Shetland launch site - useful for polar orbits, there seems to be some demand.

They aren’t talking giant rockets here, the size need to put a cubesat in polar orbit is quite small.

Dont confuse the OneWeb system with the LM Scottish spaceports, they’re not connected in any way.

https://www.shetnews.co.uk/2020/05/1...ind-plans-say/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbex


https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....51b8a6abda.png

Another very poorly argumented attemp to put a positive spin on this ****up.

All technology becomes outdated in time. If it didn't we would never advance.
Galileo is proving to be a very successful system that is central to many other EU projects. It has a great future.

Would anyone know if those tiny oneweb satellites are capable of carrying atomic clocks needed for precision?

No they can't. They are not capable of being converted to a conventional GNSS system.
It is possible however that this system, if fully implemented, could be used to as an adjunct to an existing GNSS to provide additional accuracy. But it would need specialised receive equipment to do so, so incompatible with existing equipment.

Science moves on. Just as you now have chip scale gyros/INAS you also have Chip Scale Atomic Clocks (CSAC)....

https://www.microsemi.com/product-di...mic-clock-csac

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip-scale_atomic_clock

https://c5isr.ccdc.army.mil/news_and...to_the_rescue/

So basically, as suspected we bought the wrong satellites. How wonderful.

It was never intended to replace a standard GPS system, and the value in the system wasn’t the current satellites, but as stated the orbits, frequencies, licences and ground network. The issue with Galileo was in the intention of the EU to withhold access to the precision location mode and the associated encryption.

As you will see from my last link in post #247 above, the aim is replace/supplement existing GPS, where the existing satellites and signal are increasingly vulnerable to jamming and physical attack.

Cube, nano and even Femto swarm satellites in LEO are seen as the emerging technology. The price, at the cost of 3-4 F-35Bs, might be seen as somewhat of a bargain in a few years time.

Certainly an expert in the field, see post #234, who briefed the HoC committee, is not so dismissive.

Is what you have said there, the same argument that Cummings used to convince Boris to buy at this boot sale? Because if so, you're both wrong.

Orbits - there are no orbital slots for LEO satellites. It's currently a free for all, sothething that will become a problem before long. Nothing to buy there.

Frequencies - there was nothing to stop us registering the same frequency assignments, once the system had closed due to bankruptcy We did not need to buy the system to get them. And in any case there are still frequencoes available for our own system if we needed them.

Licensing - Once the frequencies are registered internationally, the only licences needed would be domestic ones. Just paperwork.

Ground stations - That's a different issue. If this is for a UK defence system we'd have to be a lot more careful about the location and control of the ground stations.

And I ask again - who is going to use a system that needs special-purpose ground equipment? Have the military or emergency services asked for it? They are all going over to COTS to save money.

And we don't even know exactly what this system, when completed, might do. At the moment it's all "might do", "could do", "would be nice to do".

It will come to nothing, just a waste of money.

Edit: This may be of interest regarding LEO orbits: https://aerospace.org/sites/default/...talSlots_0.pdf

Currently handled by the FCC in the USA, but the ultimate controller is the ITU. Orbits means frequencies - no allocation then your satellite can’t communicate with anyone. (Which is why there is such an interest in laser comms between constellation elements*).

https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/2019-PR23.aspx

https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/b...e-systems.aspx

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...nd-satellites/

http://satellitemarkets.com/news-ana...constellations

* https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/sp...ared_crosslink

"Orbits mean frequencies" :)

The procedure for registering satellite frequencies is well established, and quite rightly if you don't use them you lose them. Of course. Nothing you have posted there changes what I said above.

These are not the only satellites and not the only frequencies. They are not the only game in town. There is no closing date for applications.

We have no idea at the moment whether we need satellites, and if so whether these frequencies or these orbits are suitable for what we might need.
First we need a user requirement, not some political adviser's daydream. If we actually do need satellites, we can build our own in the UK to do what we actually need, and get suitable frequency assignments for that purpose, which may very well be different from those OneWeb have obtained. As you have correctly said above, launches are easily sorted so we can get satellites launched to secure that spectrum.

I ask yet again - where is the user requirement?

https://www.adsadvance.co.uk/hughes-...onsortium.html

Hughes to join UK Government and Bharti in OneWeb consortium

Someone was ahead of their time.....

Rockets Galore 1957 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockets_Galore! and recently shown on Talking Pictures

Didn't end well for the MOD :E so perhaps they should watch the film, then look somewhere else :}

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/n...tter-5zpxq83w2

......Last year Britain became the first formal partner in the US-led Operation Olympic Defender, a multinational military coalition formed to deter hostile actors against causing trouble in space.

The Ministry of Defence is pursuing its ambition to send into low Earth orbit a constellation of responsive small satellites, which are cheaper than previous generation satellites and easier to launch.

Codenamed Artemis, the programme aims eventually to beam live, high-resolution video imagery directly into the cockpits of the RAF’s fighter jet fleet........

I predict that by the time it is capable of doing that we won't have any piloted fighters left, we'll be using UAVs . . .

I predict that they will still need to get the nav information from somewhere.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Just as the UK announces it is pulling funds for UK companies to work on a LEO GPS design - the US announces it has started one. I wonder what is going on in the background.......

https://www.technologyreview.com/202...le-navigation/


SpaceX has already launched more than 700 Starlink satellites, with thousands more due to come online in the years ahead. Their prime mission is to provide high-speed internet virtually worldwide, extending it to many remote locations that have lacked reliable service to date.

Now, research funded by the US Army has concluded that the growing mega-constellation could have a secondary purpose: doubling as a low-cost, highly accurate, and almost unjammable alternative to GPS. The new method would use existing Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) to provide near-global navigation services.

In a non-peer-reviewed paper, Todd Humphreys and Peter Iannucci of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin claim to have devised a system that uses the same satellites, piggybacking on traditional GPS signals, to deliver location precision up to 10 times as good as GPS, in a system much less prone to interference.......

https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-s...place-galileo/

UK scraps Brexit alternative to EU’s Galileo satellite system


LONDON — The U.K. is set to scrap former Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan to replace access to the EU’s satellite navigation system Galileo after Brexit with a home-grown equivalent.

The UK Space Agency is expected to announce that contracts awarded to U.K. space companies to build the British Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) will not be extended beyond their expiration date at the end of this month........

The government will instead ask companies to put forward “innovative” solutions that give the U.K. additional resilience to that of Galileo and GPS, the U.S. satellite navigation system.

“The general principle is looking at alternative ways of providing resilient position, navigation and timing systems in a way that is different to GPS and Galileo. Because if GPS and Galileo fail, it may well be for the same reason, the same disruption. The idea is to come up with something different and by doing that you’ve got more chance of having one system up and running when perhaps one of the others has failed,” the executive said.......

Sad end of the story.

https://inews.co.uk/news/brexit/mini...andoned-714960