Letters / Visit Unst and conduct your own space study
Thank you for your recent coverage of the Space Watch UK study into views from the local community in Unst about the SaxaVord Spaceport.
Campaign group critical of spaceport’s engagement with local community
During our visit to Unst in May we made an effort to find out what people in Unst thought about SaxaVord Spaceport. We’re grateful for their hospitality and for sharing their opinions, and our study presents the evidence we gathered. As we stress in our write-up, most local people are optimistic about the spaceport and think that its longer-term impacts will be positive.
That said, there are frustrations about the slow pace of construction work and its impacts, and we consistently heard from the people we spoke to that they would like to have more engagement with SaxaVord Spaceport.
Of course, there may be some people who don’t like what we’ve published, and think that the reality is different. However, we stand by the findings of our investigation.
Anyone who doesn’t like our conclusions is welcome to visit Unst and conduct their own study. If it tells a different story to what we heard, we’d be very interested to hear so. But we’d suggest that it’s not a wise move to criticise until you have hard evidence to support your views.
Your article makes the comment: “Seen as “anti-space” by the wider industry, SaxaVord Spaceport declined to engage with the group’s investigation”. We presume it is not SaxaVord Spaceport who you are presenting as ‘anti-space’, but Space Watch UK.
This is emphatically not the case, as a visit to our website will show. Our website sets out our aims and demands, which include keeping space for peaceful purposes, ensuring that the space sector operates sustainably, supporting communities who are affected by space-related activities, and calling for objective information about space issues. Why should anyone in the wider space industry object to these aims?
Our aim throughout the process has been to engage with the operators of the SaxaVord Spaceport and we have asked to meet with them to hear their own views and have offered to brief them about the findings of our study.
The spaceport have not replied to our communications, and neither, it appears, did they want to say anything to the Shetland News. Perhaps there is something in what our survey respondents said, after all.
SaxaVord Spaceport is more likely to prosper if it has community support. The good news is that the spaceport can improve matters easily by taking some relatively simple steps. You can read ideas from people in Unst about how they would like to work with SaxaVord Spaceport in our study, which you can find on the Space Watch UK website.
Peter Burt
Space Watch UK
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