The announcement was finally made, after years of economical and scientific ferment around aerospatial environment: Puglia will host the first spaceport in Europe, said the Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Transports.
The site has been identified by ENAC in the airport of Grottaglie, already european center of drones experimentations since 2016 due to the very favourable atmospherical conditions.
The project will benefit from the already existing structures, and provide a stimulus to the area in terms of turism, research and entrepreneurship – especially space-related start-ups. It is also relatively close to the “Center of Spatial Geodesy” in Matera, managed by Telespazio (Leonardo and Thales).
The business plan was set in December with an agreement between Altec (participated by Italian Space Agency – ASI and Thales Alenia Space) and Virgin Galactic, mark born with the purpose of offering the first turistic sub-orbital flights.
The latter is already experimenting a flight system based on two modules: WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo. While the first one will be in charge of the take-off, the second module will be released in flight, allowing the six passengers to reach an altitude of 100 km and to feel the unique experience of real microgravity.
Following the actual information, the plane will be maintained at this altitude for around six minutes, before gliding back and landing after 1h 40m from the departure.
The total cost of the experience is calculated to be more than 200.000€, and is born to be a driving force for the development of the area, the commercial space transportation field and space tourism.
It has to be said that Richard Branson is not the only high class investor interested in developing relatively economic and scalable processes of suborbital flights: Jeff Bezos with his Blue Origin, realized the first experimentation on the 29th of April, positioning himself as a potential competitor in this futurist commercial sector.
The Virgin-Altec project will be operational only around 2020, as flight experimentation, structure organization and building, as well as legal issues still have to be taken care of. In fact italian legislation does not include normatives on sub-orbital flight, which are now in course of drafting by ENAC in collaboration with FAA (Federal Aviation Administration – US), using US legislation as a model.
The spaceport is considered a commercial and scientific strategic project, and is part of a more branched scheme to boost European autonomy in terms of spatial exploration and development.
Also if space is usually related to fantasy, curiosity and disinterested research, it is actually a very fertile and high economical inducting field: it involves a high number of economical opportunities and sectors, such as transportation, high tech precision industry, materials science and research, geolocalization systems, employment related services and others. Italy is one of the leading countries in space research and systems development, hosting some of the major research centers and related companies, such as Thales and Leonardo.
During last decades those two companies were able to develop efficient sinergies allowing them to be top players on the fields of satellites constructions, geo-localization systems building, defense and more.
On the other hand Italian Space Agency (ASI) is part of some of the most interesting space projects like “Clean Space”, a coalition based study for the collection and safe landing of satellitar wastes, “Space Lab”, a collaboration between Avio and ASI on sperimental propulsion systems and transportations, and “NanoRacks”, participated by Altec, which aims to be a development business center for asian and european companies to facilitate access to low-orbit providing software, hardware and land services and personnel.
It is positive and interesting to see a renovate interest in spatial research; maybe it will be both an opportunity for growth, as well as an opportunity to dream more and in a communitarian perspective. It is not a case if, after US presidency detachment from European objectives, ESA funds grew of 18,4% last year reaching the level of 5,25 billions and still on the rise.
The most importants ESA projects include Galileo, the european GPS system, and Copernicus, a project to use satellitar observations to provide environmental security data and not only.
So, as we can see the Grottaglie spaceport won’t be for sure a direct opportunity for middle-class people to visit space, considering actual prices, but it will be the perfect opportunity to give a specific and modern business structure that could represent a model and an opportunity both to that geographical area and to commercial space field in general, as well as to be a strategical structure for European space-related projects.
Taking men closer and closer to planetary research and space-colonization planning.
Zenith - Political Lab 