Spaceport Cornwall: Scaling environmentally responsible space futures in South West England

Introduction: #GoodSpace

In May 2022, a one-day workshop brought together a range of stakeholders involved in the development of a new spaceport located near Newquay, a small town on the north coast of Cornwall (UK). ‘Spaceport Cornwall’, based at Newquay Airport, had been in development since 2014, when the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government launched a competition to establish the first commercial spaceport in the UK. In July 2018, the spaceport team negotiated an agreement to become the first UK site for Virgin Orbit’s horizontal space launch services. In advance of the first launch, which, after numerous delays, took place in January 2023, the workshop provided the spaceport’s leadership team and partners with an opportunity to share their hopes and visions for the spaceport.

Melissa Thorpe, Head of Spaceport Cornwall from September 2021 until May 2023, took to the stage to outline the principles of ‘good space’ that guided her and her team’s work. This charismatic, social media-friendly phrase referred to the use of space science and technology for ‘good’ causes, such as launching satellites that monitor climate change, reviving regional economies by attracting space-related businesses, or generating new jobs and educational opportunities. Thorpe’s ‘good space’ vision built on corporate narratives of ‘tech for good’ that have proliferated in response to growing public and political anxieties that have surfaced around ‘big tech’. Many corporate actors have now deployed the ‘tech for good’ slogan and this phrase has become an established part of the language of corporate social responsibility (CSR). As a woman in a major leadership position in the male-dominated space sector, Thorpe herself embodied Spaceport Cornwall’s ‘race for a better space’ (as per the title of her 2022 TEDx Talk). ¹ During her talk at the workshop, Thorpe discussed how Spaceport Cornwall’s ‘goodness’ operates across multiple scales, particularly in relation to climate change. She explained that environmental responsibility sat at the core of ‘good space’ and highlighted how Spaceport Cornwall is addressing the climate crisis at both local and planetary scales, through on-site rewilding initiatives and through the launching of Earth observation satellites, among other activities. Thorpe informed the audience that environmental sustainability is woven into the fabric of the spaceport, guiding decisions ‘from the food we order to the things we launch into space’. Her talk ended with a focus on the forthcoming launch, stating that the aim was to develop environmentally responsible launch capabilities that will ultimately enable ‘Cornwall to proudly go to space without costing the Earth’.

Taking Thorpe’s climate-conscious and multi-scalar vision of ‘good space’ as its focal point, in this article, I analyse the conflicting environmental imaginaries that surfaced around the implementation of Spaceport Cornwall during the pre-launch period between 2018 and 2023, a temporal moment charged with promise, anticipation, and public debate. Geographers and political ecologists have used the term ‘environmental imaginary’ (Peet and Watts, 1996) to investigate how discourses, ideologies, images, and sociopolitical practices shape the ways that people come to understand and perceive their environments. Here I use the term to refer to the ways that discourses and images related to climate change have shaped (or have been strategically mobilised to shape) perceptions of Spaceport Cornwall’s development. Imaginaries in this context are not falsehoods or fictions detached from the material world, but visions of possibility, promise, or fear, that have been co-produced through national policies, media releases, regulatory frameworks, and institutions related to the infrastructure project (Jasanoff, 2015). While multiple spaceports are currently being built in the UK, Spaceport Cornwall is significant in positioning environmental responsibility as a key promise of its development. However, the climate-friendly futures imagined and promoted by the spaceport have not gone uncontested, attracting considerable criticism from local climate activists concerned with the environmental implications of the infrastructure.

Scholarship within the interdisciplinary field of social studies of outer space (SSOS) has demonstrated the importance of engaging with local sites where outer space ‘touches the ground’, as a means of challenging techno-utopian fantasies of space as detached from Earthly geographies, politics, and power relations (Battaglia et al., 2015; Beery, 2016; Dunnett et al., 2019; Redfield, 2000; Siddiqi, 2015). Space launch facilities are entangled with terrestrial politics and their development can reproduce existing patterns of social, spatial, and environmental inequality (Klinger, 2021; Mitchell, 2017; Reser, 2019; Sammler and Lynch, 2019). As such, the construction of launch sites is often a heavily contested process, sometimes generating considerable outcry and protest from local communities (Gorman, 2007; Öhman and Mikaelsson, 2014; Sheehan, 2018; Sörlin and Wormbs, 2010). In Cornwall, public outcry focused predominantly on the environmental impact of the spaceport within the context of global climate change. SSOS scholarship – which focuses on the social, cultural, historical, and political dimensions of space activity and the power dynamics that structure relations between outer space and social life on Earth – has begun to develop eco-critical analyses of the space sector (Gál and Armstrong, 2023; Klinger, 2021; Olson, 2018; Olson and Messeri, 2015; Rand, 2019). SSOS research has also investigated the sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the ‘NewSpace’ age – the name given to a new era of commercially orientated space activity driven by private corporations and venture capitalists rather than government investments (Klimburg-Witjes, 2024; Tutton, 2018; 2020). However, limited attention has been paid to the ways in which the climate crisis is shaping imaginative engagements with space infrastructure in specific regional contexts. Advancing SSOS discussions on the relations between infrastructures, imaginaries, and the climate crisis, this article offers an ethnographically grounded analysis of the climate-conscious space futures that have been constructed and contested in relation to Spaceport Cornwall. Such a focus directs analytical attention to the role that scale, and practices of scale-making, play in imaginaries of the spaceport’s environmental impacts. As we will see, the spaceport’s imagined promises of economic growth and environmental responsibility are deployed and challenged across multiple scales, tacking not only between the local, regional, global, and cosmic, but also between the present and the future, with different actors and publics engaging in strategies of imaginative scaling to make their claims. Through this analysis, this article contributes to scholarship on infrastructure and scale (Ullberg et al., 2023; Vonderau, 2019). ² While it has been noted that scale as a concept remains under-theorised in critical infrastructure studies (Ullberg et al., 2023: 2), scale has been a key concern of geographic inquiry since the 1990s (Sheppard and McMaster, 2004). A focus on the environmental imaginaries conjured across spatial and temporal scales in relation to Spaceport Cornwall offers a generative opportunity to bring geographic work on the social construction of scale (Marston, 2000) into dialogue with scholarship on the imaginative affordances of infrastructure.

Researchers in the field of critical infrastructure studies have approached infrastructures not only as technical and material objects but as dynamic, relational, and ideological entities that generate ‘imaginative-fantastic meanings’ (Humphrey, 2005: 43) for the different actors and publics involved in or impacted by their development. Anthropologist Brian Larkin (2018: 189) notes that ‘infrastructures never just supply electricity, water, or gas’ but also express or articulate ‘possible futures’. Infrastructures can give concrete expression and material form to imaginaries of the future, ideologies of progress and development, or, equally, dystopian visions (Anand et al., 2018). Indeed, they can become sites of intense contestation if their development is anticipated to bring harm or if they should break down or fail. The promises (and perils) of infrastructures are invariably tied to the specific social contexts in which these projects develop and deteriorate and the various ‘technologies of imagination’ (Sneath et al., 2009) – e.g. government policy papers, technical reports, media representations, press coverage – through which planners, politicians, and publics encounter and envision them. Media scholar Lisa Parks (2015: 355) uses the term ‘infrastructural imaginaries’ to describe the different ways of understanding infrastructures that arise through engagements with discourses and representations related to these sites, from architectural renderings and planning documentation to marketing materials.

The imaginative affordances of infrastructures stem partly from their capacity to extend, configure, connect, and move matter across spatial and temporal scales (Larkin, 2013: 329). As connective sites where regional, national, and global forces meet, infrastructures can facilitate imaginaries of inter-scalar relationality (Hecht, 2018; Star and Ruhleder, 1996). Unlike other terrestrial transportation and logistics hubs, spaceports are infrastructural sites that construct imaginative relations of connection between planet Earth and outer space. As gateways to the cosmos, spaceports are examples of what we might call the ‘scalar sublime’.³ But infrastructures do not generate scales automatically or on their own. Their scalar effects are the co-constructed result of the material-technical affordances of the infrastructure itself and various invested stakeholders with different interests who engage in rhetorical, imaginative, political, performative, and semiotic practices of scale-making (Carr and Lempert, 2016; Hecht, 2018; Tsing, 2000; Ullberg et al., 2023; Vonderau, 2019). Geographers have drawn attention to the socially and historically constituted dimensions of scale, calling for attention to be paid to ‘what people do with scale categories, how they utilize them to construct space and social relations for specific political aims’ (Moore, 2008: 127). In what follows, I examine how Spaceport Cornwall as an infrastructure project facilitated imaginative practices of scale-making in relation to competing ecological claims. By exploring the practices of scale-making that underpin the imaginative construction of Spaceport Cornwall as an environmentally friendly launch site, this article offers insights into the ‘scalar politics’ (MacKinnon, 2010) of infrastructure development.

The ethnographic material that underpins this article is drawn from fieldwork carried out with Spaceport Cornwall and within the wider South West space sector. This has involved conducting participant observation at various events (workshops, meetings, exhibitions) run by Spaceport Cornwall and their partners, as well as carrying out interviews with local climate activists, including members from Cornwall’s branch of Extinction Rebellion (XR). I combine this with the analysis of corporate webpages, press coverage, technical reports, and policy documentation through which Spaceport Cornwall have strived to construct and communicate their commitment to environmental sustainability. I also engage with public letters submitted to Cornwall Council by local environmentalists who contested the spaceport’s development. In doing so, I explore how this space infrastructure facilitates the scaling of environmental imaginaries across spatial and temporal contexts and trace Cornwall’s emergence as a region where it has been imagined that the promise of sustainable space can materialise.

A brief socio-environmental history of Cornwall

Cornwall is located in the South West peninsula of England. Surrounded by the Celtic Sea, Atlantic Ocean, and the English Channel, it has 422 miles (697 km) of coastline. The River Tamar to the east, which runs almost from sea to sea, serves as a ‘border’ between Cornwall and the English ‘mainland’. The region has a national identity distinct from England. Cornwall is recognised as a Celtic nation, akin to Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. English expansion into Cornwall is thought to have begun in the 9th century, after the Anglo-Saxon invasion and settlement of Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries (Payton, 2017). During the medieval and early modern periods, the Cornish people, and their Brythonic Cornish language (closely allied with Welsh), experienced an extended process of anglicisation. In 1337, the English Crown established the Duchy of Cornwall, an administrative institution (and large estate) that provided English rulers with greater control over this distant territory, and which continues to function as the seat of English royal power in the region today.

These power dynamics have continued to shape the relationship between the region and the rest of England, with Cornwall often being subject to political decisions made by central government in London. Amidst increasing visibility of Cornish nationalism after the Second World War, there were calls for decentralisation and devolution of power, to provide Cornish institutions with greater political autonomy. In 2014, the Cornish people officially received the status of ‘national minority’ (Deacon, 2021: 14). In the following year, Cornwall was given a devolution deal that aimed to provide Cornwall Council with greater powers over public sector funding, though these powers remain limited (Longlands and Round, 2021).

Historically, the Cornish economy was grounded in agriculture and the extractive industries of fishing and mining (primarily copper, tin, and china clay). Throughout the 20th century, the region experienced the protracted contraction of these primary industries and saw rapid growth in tourism. British tourists have been drawn to the region since the rise of the seaside holiday in the late 19th century and Cornwall continues to be imagined as ‘the domestic holiday capital of Britain’ (Hale, 2006: 272). The post-industrial image and identity of the region has been aligned with ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’, and Cornwall has been rebranded as a key destination for nature lovers, campers, and ecotourists. Within the British popular imagination, the region is associated with sandy beaches, sea, surfing, quaint fishing villages, spectacular cliffs, and designated Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs), all of which are often perceived to be under threat from the hegemony of mass tourism. Much has been written about the tourism industry’s commodification of the Cornish landscape (Deacon et al., 1988; Hale, 2006; Jenner, 2021). Locals have long voiced concerns that the construction of Cornwall as a tourist destination reproduces historical patterns of inequality, whereby the assets, land, and resources of the region are put in the service of non-Cornish people (particularly Londoners looking for holidays).

A recurring issue arising from the tourist trade is the region’s housing crisis which has been unfolding for several decades. This has been driven predominantly by houses being purchased as second homes or holiday lets, which leaves few houses available for locals and escalates prices in the area. In addition, Cornwall has been experiencing a jobs crisis and a social mobility crisis. According to a 2017 report conducted by the charity Cornwall Community Foundation (CCF), alongside accelerating housing costs, other social and economic challenges facing Cornwall are low wages, underfunded public transportation, and growing poverty. The report highlights that seventeen of Cornwall’s neighbourhoods are within the 10% most deprived in England (CCF, 2017: 6). The Chief Executive of CCF thus suggests that there are ‘two Cornwalls’: the postcard-perfect tourist hotspot and ‘another that lies behind, where large numbers of people live on the edge of poverty, or in ill health, or in isolation, with fragmented or dysfunctional families and widespread indebtedness and disadvantage’ (CCF, 2017: 1). Cornwall is currently recognised as ‘one of the UK’s most deprived regions’ (Moore, 2022). A social mobility report published in 2022 highlighted that low earnings and poor pay are common in many parts of this region (Sim and Major, 2022: 20). Concerns are now being voiced about Cornwall’s further socioeconomic decline after Brexit (Deacon, 2021). Since the 1990s, Cornwall had received European Union funding as part of the EU’s regional development scheme; however, this has now been cut off after Cornwall as a county voted decisively for Brexit in 2016 (Harris, 2021: 151).

As with other popular tourist hotspots, regional development and under-development are often entangled with environmental struggles. Infrastructure projects delivered under the banner of ‘development’ invariably impact local environments and their construction can generate powerful imaginaries and disputes (Nesbitt and Weiner, 2001). In Cornwall, there is a protracted history of residents, farmers, and landowners in conflict with tourists and local authorities, particularly in relation to the difficulties of balancing the economic benefits and ecological burdens of over-tourism. Cornwall also has a history of investment in large-scale, climate-focused infrastructure projects, which have provided material sites for imaginaries of Cornwall as a climate-conscious region. The UK’s first commercial onshore wind farm was built on the north coast of Cornwall in 1991. Over the next decade, six further wind farms were developed and, since 2010, the region has experienced a surge in onshore wind and solar generation (Bailey and Darkal, 2018). Today, amidst ambitious projects to develop large-scale offshore wind infrastructure, Cornwall, we are told, is ‘leading the floating offshore wind revolution’ (Cornwall Council, 2023).

In addition to the beaches and wild landscapes, a significant tourist attraction in Cornwall is the Eden Project, the world’s largest geodesic dome greenhouse, set in a former china clay pit, which houses 10,000 rare and exotic plant species. The multi-scalar promise of the Eden Project has long been conjured in marketing materials that promote its regional, national, and global significance. As one of fourteen ‘landmark’ schemes developed by the UK’s National Lottery Millennium Commission to commemorate the year 2000, the Eden Project was developed with the aim of benefitting local communities and economies while showcasing the UK’s achievements on an international scale. The Eden Project sought to position Cornwall as a global player in efforts to combat climate change, with its fin de siècle mission of managing environmental catastrophe through the recreation and conservation of fragile ecosystems, in direct response to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit’s multi-scalar call to ‘think globally, act locally’ (Bartram and Shobrook, 2000: 370). As a major land reclamation project that transformed an industrial claypit into a conservation centre powered by renewable energy sources, the Eden Project is an ‘environmental spectacle’ (Bartram and Shobrook, 2000: 375) that has played an important symbolic role in the post-mining reorientation and rebranding of the region away from extractive pasts and towards environmentally friendly futures.

Infrastructure development and environmental imaginaries in the region are closely intertwined and these climate-focused projects have played an important role in signalling Cornwall’s ambitions in the green investment arena across local, national, and global scales. Nevertheless, the ecological impacts of Cornwall’s mining legacy persist in the present. High levels of metals (cadmium, lead, zinc, copper, nickel, arsenic, and iron) continue to find their way into watercourses from abandoned tin and copper mines. The region is also experiencing a biodiversity crisis. According to the Cornwall Wildlife Trust, intensive farming and pollution have led to rapid declines in species richness since the 1970s, putting almost a quarter of the county’s terrestrial mammals, birds, and butterfly species at risk (Cockburn, 2021). Coastal and marine environments are also under increasing pressure due to littering from tourists, industrial-scale fisheries, and warming and ever-rising sea levels (Cornwall Maritime Strategy, 2012).

In January 2019, Cornwall Council declared a climate emergency. The ‘Urgency on Climate Change’ motion called on the Council to establish how Cornwall could reduce carbon emissions through low-carbon fuels and investment in renewable energy within a timescale consistent with the aim of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to restrain global warming to 1.5°C. Six months later, in July 2019, the Council published their Climate Change Plan. This document detailed the local authority’s ambition for the region to become carbon neutral by 2030 and included plans to offset its carbon footprint with a £30 million investment to plant a 20,000-acre ‘Forest for Cornwall’. The Climate Change Plan also outlined Cornwall Council’s aim to develop a new framework that would ensure that both climate change and social justice were considered in the decision-making process for major projects. The Council’s efforts to begin grappling more directly with climate change were welcomed and supported by local environmental and conservationist groups, including members of XR Cornwall, some of whom had worked closely with the Council on the development of the climate emergency motion. XR activist Christine Wilkins had been involved in this process and had eagerly anticipated the release of the Council’s Climate Change Plan. During an interview with Christine, she explained that she welcomed the climate emergency declaration but was shocked when, just ten months after the declaration, the Council agreed to invest £12.1 million to develop a spaceport at Newquay Airport. ‘We [XR Cornwall] couldn’t believe it,’ she told me, ‘it just seemed completely crazy that one minute the Council was saying “we need to combat climate change” and the next they were investing in this carbon-intensive project.’ Christine was one of many local activists that opposed the spaceport and perceived the development as contradicting the Council’s commitment to the climate. For the Council, however, the spaceport promised growth for the local economy.

The promise of space

The space sector is a domain of dense social, material, and political meaning and investment that is intimately bound up with imaginative expectations of the future. At a national level, space has been positioned by the UK government as a key avenue for economic growth, particularly after Brexit. The Conservative government’s 2021 National Space Strategy (NSS) claims that ‘The potential economic and societal benefits [of space] are huge’ (NSS, 2021: 16) and highlights that ‘The space sector delivers economic growth alongside high-skill, high-innovation jobs across the whole of the UK’ (NSS, 2021: 26). In the Strategy, the promise of space unfolds across national and regional scales, with space being positioned as a key factor in the ‘Levelling up’ policy of the Conservative government. ⁴ As then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson emphasised in his Foreword to the Strategy, the proposed plan to accelerate Britain’s space activity ‘will level up the UK by bringing opportunity to every part of it’ (NSS, 2021: 3).

Spaceports are significant infrastructural sites through which the imagined promise of space is articulated, anticipated, and scaled. The development of spaceports in the UK is presented by the Government as essential to unlocking lucrative new space markets, particularly in relation to the rise of the small satellite (‘smallsat’) market. Advances in manufacturing, miniaturisation, and digitisation, as well as changing regulatory frameworks, have significantly reduced the size of satellites as well as the costs involved in their manufacture. A report titled ‘Prosperity from Space’, published by the Space Growth Partnership (2018), identified that developing low-cost space launch sites in the UK should be one of four key priorities for the UK space sector. In addition, the development of ‘homegrown’ (House of Commons, 2021: 13) launch capabilities is seen to provide national security affordances, offering ‘greater strategic autonomy and flexibility in terms of what the UK puts into space, and when’ (HM Government, 2021: 58).

Spaceport Cornwall was one of several new launch facilities established with the aim of capitalising on this new satellite market (Figure 5). While Cornwall, and the UK more generally, is not as favourably positioned to access orbital space as launch sites located in Arctic or equatorial regions (which, due to their geographic positioning, offer shorter distances – and therefore savings on fuel costs – to polar and geostationary orbits), the growing use of horizontal launch (or ‘air-launch-to-orbit’) capabilities, whereby a rocket is attached to an airliner and launched when an altitude of c. 10 km (or 35,000 feet) is reached, is reconfiguring historical relations between geography and orbit. After the airliner takes off from an airport runway, it can position itself in relation to a range of orbits, enabling sites that would previously not have been strategically located for space launches, to access orbital space.

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Figure 1.

The Spaceport Cornwall Operations Facility at Newquay Airport. Photo by ARE Taylor.

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Figure 2.

The ‘Space for Good’ slogan is displayed throughout the spaceport site. Photo by ARE Taylor.

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Figure 3.

Sheep and Space: Virgin Orbit’s modified Boeing 747, ‘Cosmic Girl’, at Spaceport Cornwall, amidst surrounding farmland. Photo by ARE Taylor.

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Figure 4.

A billboard on the approach to Spaceport Cornwall’s site at Newquay Airport mobilises an earth-from-space photo, a popular eco-icon (Cosgrove, 1994; Helmreich, 2011), to promote environmentally-friendly space futures. Photo by ARE Taylor.

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Figure 5.

A map of forecasted spaceports in the UK (LaunchUK, 2018: 7).

Throughout its development phase, Spaceport Cornwall was persistently mobilised by the local authority as helping to address the economic difficulties facing the region. A March 2018 report, that Cornwall Council submitted to the central government to outline the Council’s plans to replace EU funding after Brexit, stimulates an imagined future of the region as a ‘high-value space cluster’ (New Frontiers, 2018: 24). Spaceport Cornwall is presented as one of the key sites through which this cluster will enable the county to ‘unlock regional growth in a post Brexit world’ (New Frontiers, 2018: 1). The promise of space is also conjured across scales in this document. The spaceport, we are told, ‘has the potential to transform our local and national economy’ (New Frontiers, 2018: 24). At a local level, the Council highlight that the spaceport will generate economic growth, while at a national level the spaceport promises to provide ‘highly skilled employment opportunities’ (New Frontiers, 2018: 23): ‘Cornwall Spaceport has the potential to cumulatively realise over £290 million additional economic activity in Cornwall and 500 new jobs nationally’ (New Frontiers, 2018: 24).

In human geography, ‘scale jumping’ (Smith, 1993) has been identified as a discursive strategy and political tool that actors deploy to justify and achieve particular projects, often reinforcing established power dynamics. Scale jumping, according to Moore (2008: 209), ‘takes place when political claims and power are established at one geographical scale and extended to another’. In the case of political discourse on Spaceport Cornwall, scale-jumping encourages readers to imagine the growth and prosperity that space promises to bring to Cornwall benefitting the UK as a whole, and vice versa, flowing back and forth between the regional and the national. In July 2018, Spaceport Cornwall gained further leverage when an agreement with Virgin Orbit was signed. Similarly, navigating between national and regional scales, Sam Gyimah, then-Science Minister, stated that this strategic partnership ‘is great news for the region and the UK’s ambitions for regular, reliable and responsible access to space’ (cited in Greenbank, 2018). The deal received considerable press attention, which provided further opportunities to promote the promise of the spaceport. As then-Head of Spaceport Cornwall Miles Carden stated in one news article: ‘Spaceport Cornwall will deliver 480 jobs with revenue income of £25m in the next 10 years. Those new jobs will be highly skilled and well paid’ (cited in Whitehouse, 2018). Carden did not specify whether these will be local jobs, helping to address Cornwall’s job crisis. While Virgin Orbit had agreed that their launch services could be used, they did not provide any initial funding. It was hoped that having a big name like Virgin Orbit attached to the project would attract further investment. In the same news article, Cornwall Council Chief Executive Kate Kennally stated, ‘We are working on the basis to attract a whole range of commercial operators with very little government subsidy, that is from central government or Cornwall Council’ (cited in Whitehouse, 2018).

These promises of private funding broke down just under a year later. In a June 2019 press release, the UK government announced that most of the funding would have to come from Cornwall Council, who would need to invest up to £12 million (Gov.uk, 2019). Central government would provide up to £7.85 million from the UK Space Agency, while £2.5 million would come from Virgin Orbit. A further £500,000 would come from the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership (CIOS LEP). This reliance on public subsidies closely echoes the unequal public–private partnerships that have underpinned the development of spaceports elsewhere in the neoliberal NewSpace era. Spaceport America in New Mexico, which opened in 2011 after establishing a partnership with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic in 2006, predominantly relied on state taxpayer’s money to fund its construction (Sammler and Lynch, 2019). Journalist Sam Markwell (2014) discussed the socioeconomic contradictions underpinning Spaceport America:

New Mexican taxpayers, in a state in which public infrastructures are fraying and that boasts the highest rate of child hunger (30.6 percent, and second highest in hunger among the general population), are subsidizing the business ventures of multi-billion dollar transnational corporations like Virgin Galactic to the tune of a total construction cost of $212 million.’

While the NewSpace era is often characterised by the receding involvement of nation states in the space sector, governments still play a key role in facilitating space activity by establishing political and economic conditions conducive to space sector businesses (e.g. by channelling public funds into private space enterprises; by introducing regulatory ‘reforms’ that favour commercialisation; by encouraging and promoting investment in space-related activities).

In the June 2019 government press release, the promises of job growth that were clustering around the development of Spaceport Cornwall were dwindling. In another shift from 2018 visions of the spaceport, the number of jobs forecasted to arise from the project had been scaled down from the 500 envisioned in the New Frontiers report (and the 480 promised by the former Head of the spaceport), to 150 jobs (again, it was not clear whether these would be jobs for locals). Instead, focus was temporally rescaled away from present-day job opportunities towards the future careers of young people: ‘Launch from the UK will be an opportunity to inspire children and young people to take up careers in science, engineering or even as space entrepreneurs’ (Gov.uk, 2019). The promise of jobs was questioned by local climate campaigners in an open letter submitted to Julian German (then-Deputy Leader of Cornwall Council) in June 2019:

It’s hard to think what jobs beyond a tiny handful would come to Cornwall … The investment from us, the poorest part of the UK, is several times greater than the tiny contribution from Branson, while our local services scream for more support.

Newquay Airport

For local climate activists, the Spaceport Cornwall project felt like a significant step away from Cornwall’s climate crisis declaration. The airport in Newquay (which is owned by Cornwall Council and where Spaceport Cornwall is co-located) has sat at the centre of longstanding local debates related to climate change and the subjugation of Cornwall to the tourist trade. Newquay Airport is often presented in government discourse as a crucial transport link, essential for tourism and, by extension, the growth of the Cornish economy. Local environmental activists have been highly critical of the airport. In an interview with Christine, she explained that the airport enables mass tourism, which accelerates the degradation of Cornwall’s landscapes. She also highlighted the carbon emissions of the airport: ‘The airport makes up about 2% of Cornwall’s carbon footprint’. Scaling up from the local to the global, she foregrounded the need to adopt a global perspective: ‘the problem with politicians is they only care about their district’s statistics, they don’t look at the bigger picture and how this all adds up around the world.’

Aviation has been widely recognised as a carbon-intensive industry and its emissions are expected to grow ‘rapidly’ until 2030 (International Energy Agency, 2023). The further development of Newquay Airport to accommodate a spaceport was seen by local environmentalists to directly contradict Cornwall Council's commitment to climate responsibility. Mark Bridges, a Cornwall-based climate campaigner and vocal critic of the airport and spaceport, voiced concerns that the development of the spaceport would reproduce historical patterns of social and environmental inequality, with Cornwall ultimately absorbing the carbon costs of space start-ups based elsewhere in the UK. ‘The airport mostly benefits Londoners who want a holiday’, Mark explained. ‘The spaceport will do more of the same’, he told me. ‘Cornwall will just become a gateway for space companies (probably based in London) and wealthy space tourists to access space,’ he said, highlighting that ‘we will be left to deal with the noise pollution and the carbon emissions.’

For Spaceport Cornwall, the co-location of the spaceport within an existing airport plays a key role in constructing and communicating the spaceport’s commitment to environmental sustainability. Rather than invest in a new carbon-intensive launch site, the spaceport is keen to foreground the environmental affordances of repurposing existing infrastructure. Their website highlights: ‘As the Spaceport is located at an existing operational airport with little new infrastructure and a low number of high-quality launches, the impact of launch in Cornwall will be very low.’ The Spaceport Cornwall website has served as a valuable platform to showcase their promise to become ‘the most sustainable Spaceport in the world’ (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Spaceport Cornwall promoting their commitment to environmental responsibility on their website. Screenshot by ARE Taylor.

One page suggests that the spaceport’s climate commitment emerged naturally from the regional context: ‘Cornwall is known and celebrated for its natural beauty, and because of this, Spaceport Cornwall had to ensure that our launch was as technologically and environmentally-sound as possible’. Visitors to the site also learn about Spaceport Cornwall’s efforts to increase biodiversity within the development zone around the airport. This initiative saw the installation of bat boxes as well as the sowing of wildflower meadows across the site (the spaceport collaborated with the Eden Project’s National Wildflower Collection). Social media provided a platform to further publicise this activity (Figure 7).

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Figure 7.

A tweet from Melissa Thorpe showcasing Spaceport Cornwall’s efforts to develop a wildflower meadow around the spaceport in collaboration with the Eden Project. Screenshot by ARE Taylor.

In the climate activists’ June 2019 open letter to Cornwall Council, concerns about the environmental impact of the spaceport were foregrounded. The letter highlights that the development of the spaceport ‘flies directly in the face of all the work we have been doing, together and successfully, to chart a way forward for Cornwall at a time of emergency.’ The campaigners note that

The primary question is about emissions and the message it sends out about our reaction to a global climate emergency. There is not even a carbon budget for it – so we have no idea what the carbon impact will be.

Another campaigner submitted an email to the Deputy Leader of Cornwall Council, asking how the investment in the spaceport

can be justified when the council is launching an action plan for the climate emergency? To say this is a slap in the face for all of us who have been working with you for the past 7 months is an understatement … Please can you tell me how Cornwall Council can justify this expenditure, rather than spending 12 million on an affordable, regular, community bus network for example.

In response to concerns voiced about the carbon emissions of the proposed spaceport, in June 2019, Cornwall Council commissioned the University of Exeter to conduct a carbon impact assessment, which was published a month later.

The 2019 carbon impact assessment

Promoted by Spaceport Cornwall as the first carbon impact assessment of a spaceport, this report assessed the direct greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O) and radiative forcing (RF) effects from planned launches and ancillary activities associated with launch missions over a 10-year period between 2020 and 2030. On Spaceport Cornwall’s website, the carbon impact assessment was presented as the centrepiece of their commitment to environmental responsibility: ‘Spaceport Cornwall is the first spaceport in the world to carry out a full carbon impact assessment prior to launch’. Cornwall Council (2019: 13) also foregrounded that this study was ‘the most comprehensive carbon assessment produced for any economic development project this Council had funded’. The report concluded that, at the projected height of activities (eight launches a year in 2030), the spaceport would add 0.04–0.1% to overall emissions in Cornwall, which, it states, ‘is not expected to impact on Cornwall’s overall GHG emissions and efforts in combatting climate change.’ For Councillors, the report provided ample evidence to justify the development of the spaceport. Councillor Geoff Brown stated: ‘This report scientifically sets out the expected carbon impact of horizontal launches from Spaceport Cornwall … Cornwall could lead the way in sustainable satellite launches’ (cited in McDonald, 2019).

Some critical commentators, however, noted the speed with which the study was conducted, and expressed ‘doubts about the quality of this very rapid research’ (Deacon, 2019). Local environmentalists focused on the report’s list of spaceport activity that was not included in the carbon measurements, which, they argued, amounted to a considerable amount of potential carbon-emitting activity.

Unlike an Environmental Impact Assessment (which is usually commissioned in advance of a development application being granted) the carbon impact assessment was undertaken after the planning process. ‘It felt like an afterthought’, Amy Seaton, a local environmental campaigner, told me, ‘too much had already been invested in the spaceport … the carbon report was never going to meaningfully question this development.’ Despite the promise of facilitating objective, evidence-based decision-making, environmental impact assessments are highly politicised documents that often provide enough interpretative flexibility to suit the claims of different stakeholders (Bond et al., 2020; Formby, 1990). Anti-spaceport environmental activists also questioned the impartiality of the report. It was conducted by the University of Exeter, which has a Memorandum of Understanding with Cornwall Council, with the aim of developing a closer relationship around space activities in the region. In October 2019, Amy compiled a document in which she listed several issues with the report’s findings. She noted that ‘there is a clear conflict of interest as the “carbon audit report” is commissioned from the University of Exeter who are being funded by the UK Space Agency’ (who had invested £7.85 million in the spaceport). Amy further noted that the jet fuel consumption rates were supplied directly by Virgin Orbit, who also had a vested interest in the project going ahead.

The carbon-centric focus of the assessment also raises questions around the uncertainty surrounding the magnitude of the effects of other forms of rocket emissions at high altitudes (Klinger, 2021; Ryan et al., 2022). Rockets are understood to be one of the only anthropogenic sources of pollution in the middle and upper atmosphere – a particularly sensitive region that is home to the ozone layer, ‘where the lifetime of combustion products can be years’ (Ross and Sheaffer, 2014: 177). Rocket emissions – which include CO₂, water vapour, black carbon soot, nitrous oxide, hydrogen chlorine, and aluminium oxide – have been linked to stratospheric warming, ozone depletion, and radiative forcing, among other harmful effects (Voigt et al., 2013). The amount of black carbon emitted by rockets in the stratosphere in 2018 was comparable to that emitted by global aviation (Ross and Toohey, 2019). Current regulatory frameworks also permit mid-air launches at high altitudes to use fuels that are banned from surface launches because of their relative toxicity (Cumins, 2020: 33). With growing numbers of spaceports being developed and, by extension, with the number of rocket launches set to increase globally over the next decade, it has been noted that ‘launch emissions are likely to be the most important contributor to the impact on climate change of the global space sector’ (Miraux, 2022: 6).

Environmental impact assessments of other spaceports that were proposing to use Virgin Orbit's services were later conducted. In August 2021, the US Federal Aviation Admission (FAA) carried out an environmental assessment of a Virgin Orbit horizontal launch from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. A number of environmental impact categories were not included in the assessment because the proposed activities would be occurring 'over the Pacific Ocean', removed from land and human populations (FAA, 2021: 7). This terracentric and anthropocentric perspective overlooks the environmental impact of space activity on marine ecosystems – such as rocket fuel leakage or debris build-up from rocket components or payloads that fall back to Earth, a point that has been raised in eco-critical space scholarship (De Lucia and Iavicoli, 2018). This report is predominantly interested in the quality of air that humans breathe and, as such, focuses on ground-level air pollution, failing to consider the impact of rocket exhaust pollutants above 3000 feet and justifying this because 'Pollutants that are released in the stratosphere do not mix with ground level emissions and do not have an effect on ground level air pollutant concentrations in any local area' (FAA, 2021: 7). The report thus concludes that there is 'no significant impact for issuing a launch operator license to Virgin Orbit' (FAA, 2021: 1). With the assessment focusing predominantly on the environmental impacts of launches that might affect humans, any pollution to the distant layers of the atmosphere (the effects of which remain understudied and uncertain), the ocean, or nonhumans is largely overlooked.

The 2019 spaceport protests

In November 2019, four months after the carbon impact assessment was published, the final funding vote for the spaceport took place in the County Hall of Truro. The vote was to determine whether Cornwall Council should invest £12.1 million in the development of the spaceport, after earlier hopes for commercial investment had fallen through. Objectors to the spaceport, including members of XR, held a protest outside the County Hall ahead of the meeting and then moved into the public gallery when the meeting commenced. They were joined by locals carrying signs, flags, and banners. Members from the Red Rebel Brigade attended, dressed in their red robes and white face paint, while other XR protestors were outfitted in the clothing and make-up of the Penitents (Figure 8).

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Figure 8.

Extinction Rebellion activists outside County Hall in Truro (Cornwall) protesting the spaceport at the November 2019 council meeting. Photo by Simon Heester.

The debate about whether to fund the spaceport lasted for three hours. Councillor Paul Wills proposed a motion to defer the funding decision, calling for more information about the environmental impact of the project. This motion was rejected and, with a vote of 66 to 34, with one abstention, the funding was approved. Edwina Hannaford, a Cabinet member who had voted against the proposal when it originally went to Cabinet in September 2019, said she could still not support the project because it was incompatible with the council's climate change action plan. Questions submitted by the public in advance of the meeting pivoted around whether the spaceport project aligned with Cornwall Council’s zero carbon strategy. One question asked, ‘Having declared a climate emergency, how does the council justify increasing carbon emissions when reduction is the goal and offset is only a last resort?’ Another asked, ‘In light of the climate emergency, that Cornwall Council declared … how can you warrant spending £12million on an enterprise that will do nothing to aid carbon reduction?’ The Deputy Leader, Julian German, directed attendees to the carbon impact assessment, foregrounding that ‘The Spaceport project had gone further than any previous Council-led economic development project in understanding and highlighting its carbon impact.’ He accepted ‘that launching satellites created carbon’ but justified the Council’s funding of the spaceport project, arguing that it presented an ‘extraordinary economic opportunity’. He further noted that carbon production could be justified (and offset) for exceptional projects that are able to evidence they will deliver ‘wider social, economic and environmental benefits.’ The Deputy Leader highlighted the economic benefits and business opportunities that the spaceport promises to bring to the region, and the role that satellite technology can play in monitoring global climate change. He also discussed the Council’s plans to offset the spaceport’s carbon emissions through the purchasing of woodland carbon credits. In addition, he noted that satellite launch operators, like Virgin Orbit, would be required to meet the carbon costs of operations through their launch fees. He foregrounded the economic advantage of this approach, suggesting that this would ‘provide an ongoing revenue stream to fund the offset of Spaceport Cornwall’s carbon impact in line with the Council’s vision of carbon neutrality’.

With the Council seemingly willing to fund carbon-generating projects if they promised ‘extraordinary economic opportunity’, for the spaceport critics the prospect of a low carbon Cornwall was thus deferred into the future; something that will hopefully arise one day, if no other economically attractive projects were proposed in the meantime. While climate strategies may signal ambition and action, it has been observed that many of the current sociotechnical mechanisms proposed to grapple with carbon emissions, from carbon capture and storage ‘solutions’ to carbon credit schemes, serve as ‘time-buying’ measures that ‘functionally permit the delaying of comprehensive decarbonization’ (Low and Boettcher, 2020: 1). Forest carbon capture projects, through which Cornwall Council proposed to offset the spaceport’s carbon emissions, have been critiqued for encouraging corporate actors to delay the need to reduce their emissions at source, enabling them to continue with ‘business as usual’ (McLaren et al., 2023). Whilst discussing Cornwall Council’s ambition to plant a new forest to sequester carbon, Mark told me that, ‘we can’t plant our way out of the climate crisis’. Elaborating on what he called the ‘folly of carbon sink forests’ he explained that:

a quarter of saplings die young, it takes twenty to thirty years before a tree draws a significant amount of CO₂, and it creates a monoculture of non-native tree species that can cause ecological havoc, damaging pre-existing forests.

Carbon offset projects, he concluded, further delay action into the future and fail to address the core need to reduce CO₂ emissions at source in the present. Christine similarly foregrounded the problematic temporal politics behind the Council’s decision when she told me that ‘climate change is happening now … we need to cut emissions now, not in the future’. The environmental imaginaries of climate activists did thus not only tack between different spatial scales but also between temporal scales, calling for a shift in focus and action away from the future and towards the present. Discourse on the climate crisis is often future-orientated. However, for the climate activists, this persistent invocation of the future enabled corporate actors to justify the delay of cutting carbon-emitting activity in the present.

In the November Council meeting, the Cabinet ultimately voted in favour of the spaceport. Notably, 4 out of the 10 Cabinet members voted against the recommendation. The meeting was abandoned immediately after the vote, when protesters in the public gallery threw paper aeroplanes and started chanting ‘shame on you’ (Figure 9). The decision to vote in favour of the development had largely been expected prior to the meeting, with opponents of the spaceport publicly stating that this project appears to represent another of many ‘exceptions’ to the Council’s climate emergency (Deacon, 2019). Tom Scott, a member of the Green Party in Cornwall had argued that the Council should not be investing such large sums of public money in projects that produce carbon. ‘[T]he real question’, Scott stated, ‘should be whether any new activity that causes an increase in emissions should be something that the council is paying some £12 million to facilitate’ (cited in MacFarlane, 2019). Scott suggested that the money ‘could be spent on other projects that actually reduce emissions as well as creating jobs, such as home insulation or low-carbon public transport’ (MacFarlane, 2019).

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Figure 9.

Anti-spaceport demonstrators in the public gallery during Cornwall Council’s final funding vote meeting. Photo by James Pearce.

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Figure 10.

Spaceport critics questioning the need for more satellite-based climate data. Photo by James Pearce.

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Figure 11.

A full-scale model of Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket that was used to promote the launch, stored in the Spaceport Cornwall hanger. Photo by ARE Taylor.

Satellites for good

The satellites that Spaceport Cornwall planned to launch played a leading role in the multi-scalar ‘good space’ narrative. The first launch was set to carry nine smallsats into Lower Earth Orbit. Cornwall Council’s website highlighted how these satellites were to be used for ‘good’: ‘The missions of these satellites span a wide range of activities aimed at improving life on planet Earth, including reducing the environmental impact of production, preventing illegal trafficking, smuggling, and terrorism; and a host of national security functions’ (Cornwall Council, 2022).

The promise to launch earth observation satellites enabled Spaceport Cornwall to showcase the planetary scale and significance of this infrastructure project. As climate actors, satellites promise a level of scale far beyond human capacity for monitoring. Satellite imagery and remote sensing data has been extensively used for environmental monitoring and has played an important role in establishing and verifying rates of deforestation and other forms of environmental despoilation. A number of organisations within the UK space enterprise community have run events dedicated to exploring use cases of smallsats in relation to the climate crisis. However, commercialisation (rather than combatting climate change) is often the principal driving factor behind these events. The promised environmental benefits of earth observation data are often conjured with the hope that this might stimulate the acceleration of the smallsat market. As such, within these contexts, the climate crisis presents a valuable commercial opportunity to nurture the economic growth of the smallsat sector.

Operating across scales, Spaceport Cornwall have been keen to promote not only the planetary value of environmental satellites but also their regional value. One smallsat that had been developed (but would ultimately not be included in the first launch) was the Kernow Sat 1 (‘Kernow’ comes from the Celtic word ‘kernou' meaning ‘headland', and is Cornish for ‘Cornwall’). When launched, this satellite was going to monitor the sea around Cornwall to identify areas for sea grass restoration. It was also going to monitor kelp forests and sea pollution levels. It was hoped that data from the satellite would support the installation of a kelp forest around the coast of Cornwall for carbon sequestration (kelp forests are a vital blue carbon store). Through Kernow Sat 1, Spaceport Cornwall aimed to showcase their commitment to addressing climate change while also positioning the spaceport as a venture with local interests at its core. On the spaceport’s website they highlight that the

Kernow Sat 1 is a mission with the communities of Cornwall at its heart. The satellite is being designed, built, launched, and tracked all in Cornwall, as well as having the data from it processed by school children throughout the county … Future Kernow Sat missions will identify other local issues and use satellite technology to continue to help make Cornwall a thriving, and more sustainable, place to live.

Satellites have thus been presented as multi-scalar space technologies, enabling Cornwall to contribute to the global problem of climate change, but also benefiting the local region.

While the spaceport partners were keen to promote the environmental benefits of satellites, there was also awareness of their harmful environmental impacts. Material debris left from defunct satellites is a key source of anthropogenic pollution in the near-Earth space environment (Gorman, 2019; Rand, 2019). Gärdebo et al. (2017: 49) highlight the environmental paradox at the heart of satellite-informed climate science: ‘The increasing reliance on satellite imagery also increases the amount of satellites launched and with them the amount of debris orbiting Earth’. We might also consider the environmental and social harms arising from mining the rare earth minerals required for satellite manufacture, as well as the emissions generated not only through launch but through production. The spaceport developers were aware of the ‘space junk’ issue and actively facilitated discussions around this subject. This was explored during the May 2022 workshop, where a biodiversity scientist from the University of Exeter’s Environment and Sustainability Institute highlighted that,

There are roughly 4000 satellites in orbit. In ten years, some estimate this number will rise to 60,000. Others say it will be closer to 200,000. As the satellite numbers in space grow, we need to think about the cost and benefit of these for the climate. What are the impacts? How do we limit the harm and maximise the good? What is it going to take to build satellites as rare earth minerals become more rare and mining conditions more exploitative?

As part of this workshop, breakout tables were organised based on different discussion themes, one of which was the ‘environmental impacts of space technology’. A representative from Cornwall Council at this table highlighted that smallsats have shorter lifespans (roughly five years) than the 20-year lifespan of larger traditional satellites. ‘This is good for producing quick returns of data’, the Councillor celebrated, ‘so we can quickly assess how useful that satellite has been and know whether to launch it again.’ As the Councillor pointed out, this means inefficient satellites not fit for purpose can be quickly decommissioned. However, the manufacturing of satellites with shorter lifespans is highly problematic, consuming more rare earth minerals, producing more waste in space, and potentially leading to more launches.

Spaceport Cornwall have been keen to highlight that they will only deliver a few launches per year. The spaceport’s sustainability section on their website states that ‘Launches will be high quality but low quantity with 2 launches a year’. The debris from the rockets that will fall into the ocean is presented less as a form of pollution and more as a valuable opportunity for climate science, with the website foregrounding Spaceport Cornwall’s plans to launch research projects exploring the impact of space debris on the marine environment, rather than retrieve the debris (an infographic on the site informs readers that ‘The negative impact of collecting the debris is currently higher than the impact of the debris itself’ and highlights that the spaceport will be involved in research and development into ‘reusable rockets and environmentally friendly debris collection’). Climate action here is thus primarily directed towards the management of pollution, rather than its elimination. Max Liboiron (2021: 39) has critiqued the ‘permission-to-pollute’ system that underpins such practices, which is based on the notion that ‘environments can handle a specific amount of contaminant before harm occurs’. The permission-to-pollute system directs the focus of governance towards ‘technical efforts to locate and manage’ pollution, rather than change systems that permit pollution in the first place (Liboiron, 2021: 51).

The spaceport critics questioned the value of the data the satellites would generate and asked whether the supposed environmental benefits of smallsats outweighed the impacts of launching them: an atmosphere damaged by rocket emissions; an orbital space congested with debris; and marine environments transformed into waste sites for rocket remains. As Amy stated: ‘We don’t need more satellites in space telling us how quickly the planet is dying - we already know that.’

Conclusion

Due to a dislodged fuel filter, the rocket launched in January 2023 did not reach the required orbit to deliver its payload and fell into the Atlantic Ocean. Shortly after the launch, in April 2023, Virgin Orbit filed for bankruptcy and, in May, Thorpe resigned as Head of Spaceport Cornwall. While Spaceport Cornwall have since identified a new launch partner, their messaging has been rescaled to focus more on the role of the spaceport as a hub for the growth of space businesses and the Cornwall Space Cluster.

Infrastructures are scale-jumping technologies. Their capacity to operate materially, discursively, and imaginatively across scales makes them valuable political instruments that can be leveraged by diverse actors in scale-making strategies of power. The rise of NewSpace in South West England has been underpinned by contestation, debate, and the strategic rescaling of the imagined promises (and threats) that different actors have associated with Spaceport Cornwall. For the spaceport and its partners, scale-jumping has been used to highlight the local, national, and planetary value of the infrastructure, while also enabling these promises to be rescaled and deferred in space and time. Similarly, rescaling has enabled the spaceport critics to strategically question the local and planetary impacts of the infrastructure project. The environmental imaginaries of the operators and partners of Spaceport Cornwall, which promised climate friendly and economically prosperous space futures, collided with the imaginaries of local environmentalists, for whom this infrastructure project came to embody Cornwall Council’s nonchalant approach to decarbonisation. For the climate activists, Spaceport Cornwall’s commitment to environmental responsibility was understood primarily as greenwashing, and the project was a stark example of Cornwall Council’s failure to translate their own climate policies into action. Others questioned the value of job creation in the face of the climate emergency. As one XR member poignantly put it, dramatically scaling up to the level of the planetary, ‘there’s no need for jobs on a dead planet’.

Environmental sustainability and responsibility have become key buzzwords of NewSpace discourse, particularly when the ecological and economical conveniently align, such as with efforts to develop reusable rockets or to remove debris from orbital space to reduce environmental risks to costly spacecraft. Indeed, corporate environmental commitments often surface as forms of virtue signalling and are predominantly acted upon when there is a commercial argument (Miller, 2018). At the same time, it would be inaccurate to dismiss the spaceport’s engagement with climate change entirely as a public relations stunt. The climate-focused activities arranged by the spaceport prompted discussions about the environmental impact of the space sector (whether this has generated action is another question) and the commitment to ‘good space’ / ‘space for good’ is certainly meaningful to the spaceport’s team. Efforts were also made to engage in dialogue with the spaceport critics. In a February 2022 workshop hosted by the Eden Project, Thorpe announced that the spaceport was implementing a ‘Sustainability Steering Group’, which would include participants from XR ‘as challenging friends’. Closer to the launch, however, the XR members expressed concern that their participation in the group had been misrepresented as signalling their approval of the project.

Imaginaries of space (or tech) ‘for good’ rarely generate the better worlds they promise. For local climate campaigners like Christine, Mark, and Amy, the Council’s decision to invest in the spaceport was critiqued for overlooking the needs of the present in favour of an imagined future of prosperity. The imagined futures of economic (and ecological) promise that were conjured by the spaceport were seen to arise at the expense of meaningful climate action in the here and now. The spaceport protestors’ criticism of the Council’s future-orientated ‘bias’ also invites reflection on current scholarly focus on futures. Critical engagement that deconstructs imagined futures is urgently needed, especially when the imagined futures being peddled require or justify the continuation of carbon-emitting activity (or other environmental harms, if we are to move beyond the carbon-centrism of much climate policy) in the present. At the same time, the need for newly reimagined ‘presents’ may be critical to addressing the current era of multi-scalar permacrisis. For the climate activists with whom I conducted fieldwork, a focus on environmentally just ‘futures’ should not occlude (or provide opportunities to delay, defer, or otherwise rescale) efforts to imagine and enact environmentally just presents. As Amy put it, ‘climate change is happening now, not in the future’.