Italy-UK PARTNERSHIP

PARTNERSHIP | Spring 2019 18 Grottaglie designated as Italy’s first spaceport Apulia focuses on aerospace and takes on new challenges T he futuristic dream of the British entrepreneur Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, to “pioneer twenty-first century spacecraft, which will open space to everybody” is about to come true in Apulia, at the Grottaglie Airport “Marcello Arlotta”, near Taranto. The airport, designated by the Italian Ministry of Transport as Italy’s first spaceport, should be ready for the first suborbital flights in 2020, based on the project, which the Ministry has assigned to the National Civil Aviation Authority (ENAC) for completion.  The Grottaglie spaceport will become the point of departure and arrival for “commercial” spacecrafts to be used for high-frequency space research and suborbital flights for private individuals. The airport infrastructure boasts one of the longest runways in Europe (3.6km), one of only a few capable of handling the taking off and landing of space vehicles.  The ambitious project for Grottaglie’s airport has been under way since 2015, but the final step came with the signing of the “Italy-US space cooperation on suborbital flights” agreement on 14 th October 2018 at the Italian Embassy in Washington, by the CEO of Virgin Galactic, George T. Whitesides, and Vito Pertosa, founder and CEO of Angel Group, a high-tech holding company based in Monopoli (Bari), which leads a group of pioneering companies in the fields of aviation, space and railway engineering, with over 1,200 employees, half of whom are engineers, and annually invests 15% of turnover in R&D.  The companies signed two long-term collaboration agreements, outlining joint investments for experimenting the launch of satellites from aircraft, as well as for the development of spacecrafts for suborbital flights.  The first launch of a satellite from an aircraft will be carried out at the Grottaglie spaceport, adopting a new system which no longer relies on missile launching, allowing for a reduction of costs for satellite launch operations. The second area of joint collaboration is space tourism. Spaceflights will be carried out by horizontally launched spacecrafts, using a dedicated space vehicle system, whereby the “mothership” will carry the spaceplane to an altitude of 15km and the spaceplane will then release itself and continue rising vertically to an altitude of 100km, before gliding back to the spaceport. Virgin Galactic has already sold 600 tickets for spaceflights at a ticket price of $250,000, and Apulia is preparing to become an attraction for “space economy” billionaires.  Finally, the third field of co-operation for activities at the Apulian spaceport included in the agreements is linked to the opportunities for developing logistics, using suborbital flights. According to design engineers, the space vehicle that Virgin is testing can reach Los Angeles from Grottaglie in three hours. A KEY PLAYER IN AEROSPACE The spaceport is the latest of a series of high-profile initiatives to involve Grottaglie airport which started out as an infrastructure for air cargo traffic and has become, over the years, an