Dorothy Pritchard on the Moine near the proposed Spaceport.

By Alison Campsie,
Published by Banbury Guardian, 15 December 2024

A community which spent eight years trying to secure Sutherland Spaceport for the future of the area speaks out after the company switched its launches to Shetland.

All was well at a lunch in the Tongue Hotel on the final Monday in October when Phillip Chambers, chief executive of aerospace company Orbex, stood up and told those gathered about the bright future for the Sutherland spaceport.

Construction was well underway, things were looking good and the company was gearing up to launch its first rockets on the A’ Mhòine peninsula in 2025.

The mood was positive in the room, where board members from Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) gathered on a trip to see the spaceport, which had received £14.5 million in public funding, for themselves.

After the visit, Stuart Black, chief executive of HIE, described the development – due to create 40 jobs in Caithness and Sutherland and millions of pounds of economic activity a year in an area particularly challenged by depopulation, opportunity and investment – as the “real prize”.

Just over four weeks after the lunch, however, Orbex made the sudden and bombshell announcement it was ‘pausing’ work in Sutherland – and switching its future launches to its once rival spaceport, SaxaVord in Unst, Shetland, where it will have its own pad.

With construction at Sutherland halted, Orbex, which employs 140 people in Forres, Moray, will focus on the development of small and medium-sized space rockets, its Prime rocket launcher and a new medium-sized launcher called Proxima.

Dorothy Pritchard, a retired schoolteacher and chair of the Melness Crofters’ Estate, was at the lunch at the Tongue Hotel and said there was no hint of trouble or change then at Orbex. Today, she is in “disbelief” at the rapid turn of events following an eight-year slog to get the spaceport up and running.

She has worked closely – and for free – with the company and HIE on the bold project that aimed to seize the benefits of Scotland’s emerging space industry and distribute them on the ground in the Highlands.

Ms Pritchard said: “Phillip Chambers made what I would call an Oscar-winning speech at the Tongue Hotel. He said how wonderful everything was going, how everyone was delighted with the state of the work so far and how it took the environment into consideration. It was a very happy, clappy meeting.

“I didn’t get the impression earlier from the speech that anything was wrong. It was like everything was hunky dory. How could he come and make that speech? We have partnered Orbex for the past eight years and have been a close ally of them, and HIE.”

She added: “I am in disbelief. Highlanders have a trust in people. Once you have worked with people for eight years, you have a trust in that. So, I think this is a betrayal of trust as well.”

The Melness Crofters’ Estate receives £70,000 a year in rent from Orbex through HIE for the spaceport land. That leasing arrangement will remain in place and Orbex said it would keep Sutherland under “continuous review”.

Ms Pritchard said: “We will keep using that money from Orbex on community projects, but we want to see a development. We don’t want to see the spaceport mothballed. When Orbex say we ‘may’ consider developing the site towards the end of the decade, I find it appalling really. It is a cavalier attitude. It is a neutralising effect on development here.

“We were never doing this just for Melness. We saw this as planting a seed of something that other things could grow from. It is a much bigger picture than just Melness.

“I was born and brought up here and I know what it was like for my generation in the 1970s when people had jobs. There was a thriving community, the oil industry was booming, a lot of families established themselves here. There were busloads going to Dounreay, tourism was booming.

“Now it is so fragile, it is so on the edge. We need something here, something different. I just feel this is a very disadvantaged area.

“We were told the spaceport could turn the area around. That is how it was sold.”

Several spin-off projects have been devised locally on the back of the spaceport, some which have been mapped out in collaboration with Orbex. The crofters were due to take on the lease of the former Highland Council Caladh Sona care home in Talmin and rent it back to Orbex to house staff.

Ms Pritchard said: “We have incurred costs to date in legal fees to draw up those leases. Those leases are waiting to be signed.

“We have taken on building 12 affordable houses and the plans are with Highland Council as well. We want housing to anchor our people here and we thought the spaceport would create more of a need for housing.”

Today, the spaceport is at a standstill. A “floating road” that runs across the vast peatbog that surrounds the site, where rockets carrying satellites were due to be fired into low orbit, is not quite complete. Building of the launchpad was due to begin in January, but the milestone will now not be reached.

Getting the spaceport in place took the Melness crofters, all whom work as volunteers on the board, on a challenging route through the planning system as well as a case at the Scottish Land Court and then a fight at the Court of Session after billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen, a Dane who is Scotland’s largest landowner, tried to stop the development.

Ms Pritchard said: “It grieves me to think that we have gone through so many normal democratic processes of our country and they have now been made a fool of. Orbex can just say ‘right, we are not doing this now’. We passed all those hurdles, a lot of money has been spent and that has just been cast aside.”

Referencing the time the crofters have put in to the project, Ms Pritchard added: “I don’t think tens of thousands of pounds would be enough to pay us.”

The crofters now want HIE to look for another company to use the spaceport “and for Orbex to be happy with that”.

“We don’t want to punish Orbex and tell them to go away,” Ms Pritchard said. “We have had a long relationship with them, but I wish they would work more collaboratively with HIE and ourselves so that the spaceport can go ahead.”

Mr Povlsen’s company Wildland made its latest objection to the spaceport this summer when Orbex applied to build an antenna park on Ben Tongue to track the trajectories of rockets. The company opposed the plans on the grounds of impact to the environment, wildlife and the wider scenic area.

Wildland owns seven estates in Sutherland as Mr Povlsen builds his high-end hospitality empire amid his vision to ‘re-habilitiate’ Highland landscapes for nature.

Meanwhile, Wild Ventures, which is wholly owned by Wildland with Mr Povlsen as a director, is the major shareholder in the company that owns SaxaVord, where Orbex will now launch its rockets.

Wild Ventures more than doubled its shareholding in Shetland Space Centre Ltd between January 2023 and January 2024, according to statements held by Companies House.

Tim Kirkwood, chief executive of Wildland, also owns significant shares in Shetland Space Centre Ltd.

A spokesman for HEARTLAND, which represents the interests of the Holch Povlsen family, said: “HEARTLAND didn’t play a part in the recent decision, which was entirely a matter for Orbex and SaxaVord.”

Last week in Parliament, Rhoda Grant, Labour MSP for Highlands and Islands, prompted First Minister John Swinney to commit to exploring the possibility of recouping public funds spent on the Sutherland spaceport and bringing the site into use.

Ms Grant said she found it “very strange” that Orbex was now going to the spaceport in Shetland given that shareholders there had made life “incredibly hard for them to develop in Sutherland”.

As well as funding through the Scottish Government and HIE, Orbex has received £28.5m in investment from the state-owned Scottish National Investment Bank. The bank said the investment was tied to Orbex and its developing technology and not a specific site.

On public funding through HIE, Ms Grant added: “This was work being done in an area that desperately needed population retention and jobs and if that wasn’t the case, HIE would have invested in Shetland rather than Sutherland. Back in the day, the folk in Unst were furious that the money was going to Sutherland spaceport, but it was very clear that Sutherland needed the jobs.

“Sutherland is on its knees, it is facing depopulation and that is why it was being funded. That is why I am saying they need to claw back the money as something needs to happen there. We can’t wait for Orbex to faff about. We need something that is going to make the step change now or there is not going to be a community there to protect.”

Trudy Morris, chief executive of Caithness Chamber of Commerce, said the community felt “blindsided” by the announcement.

She said there was nothing to suggest there were issues with the spaceport. Indeed, Orbex issued a notice for tender for the next stage of construction on November 22.

Ms Morris said: “There is something obviously not right. You don’t issue tenders for work and ten days later have a complete U- turn and basically pull out of the site. We are hugely disappointed and frustrated that we have been led to believe that everything is on track and it clearly wasn’t.

“We will be pushing Orbex and the public sector partners to get the site released for other potential operators because it is totally unacceptable that after all this time and money that has been poured into that, it is mothballed. Pausing it is unacceptable.”

Company accounts for Orbital Express Launch Limited – or Orbex – published in September for the year ending December 31, 2023 reported the company had an accumulative deficit of just over £37m – up from £20.1m the year before.

“Due to the group being in the development phase of its business plan, it has experienced cumulative losses since its inception,” the directors’ report said.

The group had £15.6m in cash in the bank as well as “significant awarded, but unclaimed grant income”, the report added. The document said the group was “well positioned to launch its vehicle development program and complete construction of the spaceport”.

The company was due to embark on further equity fundraising in the final quarter of this year, which, in addition to secured grant income, would be sufficient to allow the group to “continue developing its technology and operational capabilities in order to commence revenue generating activities”.

The report added: “If the group is unable to secure these funds, it would have to seek alternative financing or reduce the costs of ongoing operations to be able to continue to meet its obligation as they fall due.”

David Oxley, director of Strategic Projects at HIE, said the priority now was to get the Sutherland spaceport up and running as quickly as possible. HIE has so far paid Orbex £2m from a £6.5m grant for works completed.

Mr Oxley said: “We’d like to see Orbex to un-pause the site and to move it forward as quickly as we can. This is very early days. We are just over a week from the announcement, but we want this site to become operational as soon as we can.

“It is a very important site. There are very few places in Europe from where you can launch satellites. It could have a very positive future.”

A statement from Orbex said: “We understand the frustration from the local community in Sutherland, especially from those that have been central to the development of the spaceport and we will be speaking to them in the coming weeks. However, this is a pause and we have plans to return to the spaceport at the right time.

“We are a complex business and as a start-up, we are reliant on private and public investment and competitive grant funding to support our development. We have taken this operational decision to allocate our resources to focus on our core mission of successfully achieving the UK’s first commercial satellite launch. At the present time, it makes financial sense for us to utilise SaxaVord Spaceport, which is fully licenced.

“We are in consultation with three colleagues employed on the Sutherland project to identify options for relocation or new roles.

“Orbex remains committed to the north of Scotland and we are an important contributor to the economy in the north of Scotland, employing 140-plus highly skilled workers in Forres, Moray.

“We will keep Sutherland spaceport’s development under constant review, which includes delivering on our planning obligations, while work is paused. Given our expected launch programme, we envisage utilising the available 12 launches per year allowed at Sutherland at the right time. Keeping the spaceport under constant review will help us to move it to ready completion in line with these expectations.”

See: Original Article

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