The U.K. Space Agency Has a Scottish Peat Bog Problem

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- At a traditional cèilidh shindig in the northern Scottish Highlands, my dance partner, a retired Scottish math teacher, suggested I watch the Burt Lancaster movie Local Hero. In between jigs, the kind that require a great deal of spinning, he outlined the plot. An American oil executive journeys to a remote Scottish village to buy out the residents and clear the land for a refinery. Higher and higher dollar figures are thrown around. Plenty of whisky is drunk. The residents must face a difficult decision: Do they roll over and take the money and risk changing the character of their community forever?

By the time I watched Local Hero—I highly recommend it—the 1983 movie had been pitched to me a half-dozen more times by people invested in the eerily parallel political fight happening right now on the A’Mhòine peninsula at the northern tip of Scotland. Instead of an oil refinery, the proposal is for a spaceport that would shoot about a dozen satellites a year into polar orbit 300 miles up. At risk from this miniature Cape Canaveral is a foggy stretch of protected peat bog that’s home to about 500 people, a community of rare birds, and little else. I’d definitely watch that movie.

During my visit, the peninsula towns of Tongue, Melness, and Talmine were sleepy and shuttered. In warmer months, the natural sights, including the shallow inlets known as kyles, attract a smattering of tourists driving the North Coast 500, a sort of Scottish Pacific Coast Highway. “On a summer’s evening, you’ll often see half a dozen cars parked on the Kyle of Tongue with people hoping to see an otter,” Mark Avery, an environmental campaigner and writer, told me. That sounded like a party compared with the brutally wet and windy winter I encountered. While I was there, the precarious one-lane roads were lonely, and the expanses of soggy green and brown peat surrounding them looked as wild as if they’d never been discovered. The two main restaurants were closed, and the closest open hotel was in Lairg, about an hour south. This was hardly Cape Canaveral. It was more like, well, remote Scotland.

And yet in 2018 the U.K. Space Agency selected A’Mhòine as the ideal location for its latest push to enter the crowded field of commercial spaceflight. The Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE), an economic and community development agency that represents the peninsula, won the bid for the spaceport, beating out more than 20 other areas in the country. UKSA has given £23.5 million ($28.8 million) to Lockheed Martin Space Systems to build out the site, £5.5 million to Orbex to make the rockets, and £2.5 million to HIE for continued development. In return, the local development agency got an approval from Melness Crofters Estate, a group of 56 tenants of small farms on the proposed spaceport site. “We’ve been involved with HIE along the way—there have been a lot of negotiations,” says Dorothy Pritchard, chair of the Melness group. “It’s a beautiful area. We didn’t want that spoiled.”

The surrounding communities remain unconvinced that the path to sun-synchronous spaceflight should run through their backyard. At the small sundries shop that doubles as Tongue’s post office, one woman shook her head and told me, “It’s really divided the community.” Advocates say that by 2024 the spaceport will bring as much as £79 million in economic activity to the rapidly depopulating region, whose young people have to head far south to Inverness or Edinburgh to find work. Opponents dismiss the facility as a greedy, shortsighted grab at land that’s vulnerable to climate change and a key bulwark against it. The proposed spaceport site comprises 800 acres of Europe’s largest peat bog, an ecological system that stores approximately 400 million tons of carbon beneath its surface and plays host to protected fauna, including golden eagles and black- and red-throated divers.

Environmental concerns motivated Alistair Gow and John Williams, two retired science teachers who’ve each lived in the area for more than a decade, to start the Protect A’Mhòine campaign to fight the UKSA development. “A’Mhòine is an important, beautiful, and fragile environment,” Gow said via email. “HIE are totally unaware or unable to cope with environmental issues. They believe that having a green roof on a launch-control building is an environmental asset.”

The retired teachers aren’t alone. Also opposing construction is the conservation company Wildland Ltd., controlled by Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen and his wife, Anne. The Povlsens, whose fortune comes from clothing, including the Bestseller, ASOS, and Zalando brands, are the largest private landowners in Scotland, with holdings of 220,000 acres, primarily in the Highlands. Another Povlsen company holds a hunting lease on a section of the proposed spaceport site, according to the regional newspaper, the Press and Journal. “The proposed site lies at the heart of an area of immense natural beauty and environmental value,” a Wildland spokesperson wrote in an email. “By focusing our resources on new developments which build on our natural capital, such as scientific research, nature-based tourism, and carbon sequestration, we can work towards a diversified economic proposition founded on something truly unique. This proposal poses a serious threat to that path of economic growth.”

The conflict intensified last month, when HIE published its first major planning application for the spaceport, which outlined in greater detail its plans to protect the peninsula’s character. “The visual impact is fairly minimal,” says David Oxley, director of business growth at HIE. “It blends very well into the environment around it.” An accompanying environmental impact report concludes that the spaceport could significantly hurt air quality, protected bird populations, and the habitats of otters and water voles. “We’ve considered very carefully the importance of the environment in everything we’re doing,” Oxley says, noting that Orbex, the rocketry contractor, intends to recover and reuse parts from its launched craft.

Community comments on the planning application closed on March 15; the Highland Council, a regional governing body, will consider them and provide the final approval or rejection of the spaceport. All told, 428 of 549 public comments opposed the construction. Supporters are betting the promised jobs (61 related to the spaceport, and more than 250 for the region) will help safeguard the area more than being left alone would. “We need jobs that are going to retain some young people here,” says Pritchard, a retired teacher and lifelong resident. “I’ve seen the decline over the last 60 or 50 years.” In nearby Durness, the primary school where she helped teach 30 kids now enrolls just six. David Macleod, the current chair of the community council, likewise says job needs are urgent, though he maintains his stance on the project is still neutral. “I lived away for a long time,” says Macleod, who also was raised in the area. “Most people do have to leave home to work.” Another local woman I spoke with, who asked not to be named, put it more bluntly. The most pressing need was employment. The eagles would have to nest someplace else.

At least for now, the eagles can stay. The Highland Council’s decision isn’t expected before April, and the heated opposition may get what it wants by default. Lead contractor Lockheed Martin is reportedly backing a different Scottish site for space development.

I hate to spoil it for you, but Local Hero ends with a win for the community, when an older man named Ben, living in a rundown shack on the beach, refuses to sell his land. The oil company offers him bigger plots on more exotic shorelines—Hawaii, Australia, anyplace but his village—but Ben says he doesn’t need a new beach. He likes the one he’s got.

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