‘We feel abandoned and isolated’: Couple’s despair over spaceport development on summit of Ben Tongue
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A PLAN to build an antenna park for Sutherland Spaceport on the top of a north coast mountain has met with strong opposition from two local residents.
Ian and Rachel Broughton, who live on a small croft on the slopes of Ben Tongue, say the proposed development on the summit will turn the area into a “full-time industrial site”.
The couple claim the traffic required to build and operate the development will ruin the peace and quiet of their rural home, where they have lived for the past 11 years.
“We moved here for peace and quiet and this is just going to be awful, with lorry loads of stuff going past just yards from our door,” said Mrs Broughton, whose husband taught biology at Farr High School before health concerns forced him to take early retirement.
Space company Orbex is developing the £20 million Sutherland Spaceport on a 10-acre site owned by Melness Crofters’ Estate on the A’Mhoine Peninsula.
Orbex will use the spaceport as its home port from which it will vertically launch its newly developed Prime rocket which will carry commercial satellites into space.
The company announced last year that it was seeking planning permission for changes to the layout and design of the spaceport, permission for which was granted in 2020.
It wants to relocate sophisticated antennas, used to track the trajectory of rockets from the main spaceport site to the top of 991ft high Ben Tongue, where there is existing telecommunications infrastructure.
The company is now seeking permission to build a new section of road on land owned by Tongue Estate to link up with the existing track. This will require the relocation of a pole that supplies electricity to the Broughtons’ home.
“This proposed new road wraps around our boundary behind our house,” said Mrs Broughton. “The new road is less than a metre from our boundary wall at its nearest point and is directly under our bedroom window.”
Mrs Broughton added that the antenna park was a major development consisting of two 9m radar dishes, each weighing around 9.8 tonnes and five cabinets containing the supporting electronics.
She said: “To build this complex, Orbex will need to excavate and level the site before constructing a concrete base. They want their antennae to fold up and retract into some kind of housing when not in use. The excavation for this will most likely require hammering down through bedrock.
“The mechanics of getting the antennae to work, let alone using them for their 12 launches a year, will require intensive maintenance and frequent visits to the site.This will turn Ben Tongue into a full-time industrial site with at least double the traffic currently going up to the mast.”
The Broughtons have criticised Orbex for a lack of consultation and communication.
“Communication has been very sketchy and Orbex has only passed on innocuous bits of information. I am distressed and disgusted that Orbex has conspired to treat two older people, neither of us in the best of health, in this way,” she said.
Mrs Broughton added: “We are more affected by the spaceport than any resident of Melness or any other resident in Tongue.
“No one else will have as much spaceport traffic during construction or operation as close to their property, as we will. No one in Melness will have any traffic at all, yet they invited the spaceport onto their land.
“The site on the A’Mhoine is over four and a half miles away from us, and should not affect us at all. But it is Ian and I who will be the most affected.
“There is no public campaign to counter Orbex, no petition, no pressure group, no crofters’ vote, no discussion groups. Nothing.
“Ian and I are completely abandoned and isolated. The recent public consultations Orbex were obliged to carry out were at the behest of Highland planners, not due to willingly engaging with the community.”
An Orbex spokesperson said: “We engaged with the local community before and after the submission of the Proposal of Application Notice relating to our Planning Application. As part of this engagement, we worked with Mrs Broughton to alter our plans to minimise disturbance.”
