From Shetlands to Azores, Europe's space race takes off
Projects to develop space centres that can launch satellites into Earth's orbit are sprouting up around Europe, amid the soaring popularity of small rockets and the commercialisation of space.
By the end of this year, Spanish start-up PLD Space expects to launch its Miura-1 mini-rocket from the El Arenosillo site in the southern region of Andalusia.
Satellites will also be launched "in the coming weeks for the first time in the UK", Britain's Innovation Minister George Freeman announced last month, with the first-ever Virgin Orbit rocket to be released from a repurposed Boeing 747 taking off from Cornwall.
While Sweden has for decades been home to the Esrange spaceport near Kiruna in the country's far north, and Norway has had its own space centre on Andoya island, other spaceport projects are popping up on the continent.
The UK has two, in addition to "Spaceport Cornwall", including a base in Sutherland, northern Scotland, where Britain's Orbex plans to run its future launches.
The other is in SaxaVord, in the Shetland Islands, where French group Latitude and US group Astra Space plan to launch their small rockets.
Other projects are underway in Iceland, Portugal's Azores, the Canary Islands and the North Sea, where a German consortium plans to launch small satellites from a ship.
"We're seeing a proliferation of space bases in Europe," said Marie-Anne Clair, the head of the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana.
"The commercial aspect is real: there is also an abundance of micro-satellites which will require missions from micro-launchers," she told AFP.
For a long time, satellites were primarily used for institutional missions by national space agencies which had their own launch pads.
But the market has now exploded with
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