The Midland Reporter-Telegram has an account of a visit by Glasgow Prestwick Airport and Spaceport Business Development Director Mike Stewart’s visit to the west Texas city to discuss cooperation.
Glasgow Prestwick Airport wants to become a spaceport. It also hosts Orbital Access, a company owned by Stuart McIntyre that is working on an air-launched satellite delivery system.
McIntyre is the owner of Orbital Access, a Prestwick-based aerospace company that is pursuing the business of launching satellites. The company’s Orbital 500 project has a rocket payload carrying a satellite beneath a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, Stewart said. The plane launches horizontally, climbs to 35,000 feet and the rocket separates while the plane is banking. The rocket heads to space, and a new satellite adds to the constellation of devices supporting the world’s technological demands.
Orbital and XCOR already have a relationship. They work together on development technology, Stewart said, and, as previously reported in the Reporter-Telegram in July, Orbital will oversee XCOR’s forthcoming Lynx launches from Prestwick. The Lynx is a two-passenger suborbital spaceplane under development.
The relationship between Orbital and XCOR has extended to Midland and Prestwick, which are in the early stages of creating a memorandum of understanding to lay out terms of who the spaceports will cooperate.
“Personally, I think that spaceports should be supporting each other,” Stewart said. He shared a presentation with the Reporter-Telegram that laid just how close Prestwick and the United States already are, a relationship dating back to World War II when all American-made planes passed through the airport on Scotland’s west coast for the U.K. to use in the war effort.