In this moment of great geopolitical flux, Europe is pushing for more sovereign space capabilities. There's a rise in launch providers and spacecraft manufacturing. Powerhouse collaborations are working to rival the United States and China, and more space ports are being developed. The latest launch site in Europe to receive its license is situated in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Are the Azores the answer to launch and re-entry for Europe? [Music] This is T-Minus Deep Space. I'm Maria Varmazis. [Music] The Atlantic Space Port Consortium says that it is shaping the future of space access for Europe and the world. They've recently secured a license to operate a space port in Santa Maria, Azores, Portugal. From a unique geostrategic location in the Azores, at the heart of the North Atlantic, the space port's mission is to deliver innovative and cost-effective ground service solutions to launch providers. And let's find out more now from Bruno Carvalho, director of the Atlantic Space Port Consortium. My name is Bruno Carvalho, so I'm the director of the Atlantic Space Port Consortium. I've been in the industry for a while, so more than 20 years now, and different capacities, different roles, but focused mainly on the European ventures and European market. I'm obviously based in Portugal at the moment, but I did spend two years in France and eight years in the UK, and I've been travelling a bit for the industry. The Atlantic Space Port Consortium is something that popped out like seven years ago now, at the end of 2018, beginning of 2019, when there was actually some initial discussions regarding the possibility of having a space port in the Azores in Portugal. At the time, I was still in the UK, planning to move the family back to Portugal, and that came in a natural fit. The consortium is actually a joint venture for now, or a consortium with two companies. One is I-Lex Space, which is my own consultancy company, focused on the business development side, on the market strategy and how we fit within the space ecosystem and space market. Optimal structure solutions, which is the second partner of the consortium, are based on manufacturing, particularly focused on new materials, composites, but they also do metalworks and the like. Within the consortium, we found that would be a good fit. We got to know obviously the other founders responsible for Optimal. They've also been outside of Portugal, with engineering background and all of us, and we thought that we could look into the Azores for a space port. We were cooperating on other ventures already, in terms of bringing Optimal to the space business and enhancing that. So we thought, why not, let's see what we can do in the space port. At the time, there were some initiatives ongoing with regards to how it would work. The legislation was still an ongoing process as well. There were some initial tentatives of a public tender for a concession, for an infrastructure that would be publicly owned, eventually that kind of collapsed, and we had to wait a few more years for the whole regulatory framework to be put in place. And that's what happened, really. Well, it's quite a journey there. I'd love if you could tell me a bit about the launch center. So, Mabusco Launch Center, is that correct? So, the islands, we obviously had to do an assessment of what would be the ideal locations for these things to be able to be possible, and possible from physically possible, right? The Azores are nine island archipelago, each island is completely different. Santa Maria was chosen because it's the southernmost island and the easternmost island, so we could easily fly south from Mabusco, and Mabusco is on the very southern end of the island. So, we're flying south and we're flying southeast in terms of azimuth, that's what we can aim for. And we then had to go through a safety case and safety analysis with regards to population people. The island is about 5,000 people on the islands. It's a small island, but it does have people that we need to obviously cater for. And it's an interesting topic, is that Santa Maria is probably, it's probably not, it's the only one that does not have an active volcano. Every other island does still have some volcanic activity still ongoing, which means that Santa Maria would make it a bit more stable with regards to infrastructure going forward. So, when you look at the map and even look at where it's located, it's really in the middle of the Atlantic, so it's 38 degrees north in terms of latitude, but it's really in the middle of the Atlantic, which means that we have ocean space in front of us. So, ideal for recovery, ideal for testing, ideal for all those sort of things, so we're flying into an open space, into an open zone. And that idea kind of got traction, not just for access to space from going upwards point of view, but also from a re-entry point of view. So, Santa Maria is being promoted by the Portuguese Space Agency and by the European Space Agency also as a point of return. And the Atlantic Space Port Consortium is trying to kind of bridge that gap in terms of operations for the launchers, but also to provide all the necessary services and support for those that want to re-entry. And we're talking about not human space flights, not yet, that's not the thing, but there are all sorts of companies that want to re-enter, either from in-space manufacturing, to recover those components, but also from cargo and other things that are coming from all these initiatives that are popping up in terms of developing space infrastructure, new space stations, whatever. So, we would be out-arguing a privileged position to welcome those back on earth. That sounds like a good list of different types of space organizations that you would be looking to work with. Is that who you're also working with right now, or can you tell me a bit about who you're partnering with at the moment? Yeah, so we are prioritizing the access to space from a launch perspective and as an space port operator, as we went through the licensing, so we're looking at launcher operators, so people who have a vehicle that want to find a space port and launch from. Europe has a few active launcher providers, operators or developers, because obviously they still need to get to space and they still need to prove that technology works and so on and so forth. We are working with a few of them that are probably, I would argue, most advanced because some of them already launched or civil-virtual flights and other things. But we're also being picky about some of the technology that we're choosing to host in the Azores. Why? Because we want to have, I would say, a safe environment to operate in, but also a cost-effective operation. That means that we are prioritizing hybrid, we're prioritizing things that do not necessarily require cryogenics. So we can imagine the propellants that we're looking at. So yes, we do plan to deliver locks, but probably the only cryo that we require for now. On the non-cryogenic ones, we're using providers with kerosene peroxide and things like that. So we do believe that the space ports will have a say in who wins the final race for launchers. The business needs to be viable from end to end and the launcher providers tend to focus on their problem, which is absolutely fine and maximize the performance of that vehicle. At the same time, performance for us and performance for me is really the end-to-end. How much does it cost to deliver the payload in orbit? It's not just the performance of the vehicle, but the whole value chain, the whole end-to-end. So how much does it cost to get the payload on the space port? How much does it cost to get the fuels on the space port and the integration and the transportation on Earth? The whole logistics problem that you have to cater for. People tend to focus on these things in a very compartmentalized way, and the launcher providers typically fall into that kind of trap, which is, "Okay, I have to maximize the performance of my vehicle, but then I'll use, I don't know, idrosine. We will not have idrosine in the Azores period." That's my point. I mean, giving the idrosine as an example is probably one of the most known issues, but if they want to use idrosine, I mean, please go to Kuru or please go to French Guiana or Cape Canaveral. We're not going to use idrosine in the Azores. So that's the kind of plans that we have, so we're keeping it as simple as possible. Plus, we're also a private venture, so we need to kind of leverage our own investments and be sure that we are a sustainable business and not just a fancy infrastructure that will be used once in a lifetime. That's not the plan. [Music] We'll be right back. [Music] All of that makes a lot of sense. I mean, these considerations are certainly things that, especially of a spaceport like yours, definitely has to keep in mind. And yeah, I can see why launch providers are not thinking about many of those things. It's just not their lane, but yeah, certainly spaceports do need to take all of that into consideration. It makes a lot of sense. And of the many, many things that spaceports need to think about, the licensing process is a bit notorious. And it's very different and it can be very arduous, but you have gone through it. So please tell me about how that all went. Well, a preamble to this is that, as I mentioned, we started this process like seven years ago, almost. But when we started, there was no regulatory framework in place. So when we actually started to look into what would the spaceport look like in these hours, there was no legal framework in place that we could approach. The Portuguese government actually, it's been successive governments, but they kept that strategy going, fortunately. So something that sometimes is not necessarily easy to do when you change political party, whatever, but they kept that going. And Portugal made a kind of a commitment to develop its own regulatory framework, which includes not just the spaceport, but the actual launch, satellite operations, re-entry and so forth. The first draft of the first law was published in 2019. It added its issues and the regulatory framework followed that, its issues. But we started, that allowed us to kind of start working on how it would look like from a legal perspective and policy and regulatory perspective. We went through some iterations and the government went through some iterations and they eventually settled on a revision of the law at the beginning of '24 that basically created a very competitive framework for anybody that wants to operate a spaceport and actually anybody that wants to develop space activities in the country. For the spaceport itself, following that piece of legislation being published at the beginning of '24, a revision of the regulatory framework followed suit. So we had the kind of updated version being published October '24, which then allowed us to kind of pick up all the paperwork that we had developed along these last years and submit everything. So the process seems quick and it is quick if you have the homework done. We submitted the license request in December and we got it in August. And legally, the regulator is legally bounded to 240 days for the spaceport, the license to be either issue or denied. The law even applies some pressure on the regulator to actually commit to some deadlines and some timelines that otherwise, you know, you can go in on indefinitely. Being a first, there was obviously some iteration there are some entities that need to be consulted. I mean, these range from defense, foreign affairs, environmental agencies, you know, there's a bit of paperwork to be sorted out like anywhere else. But I think that they left it in a way that, again, it's competitive. Now, there's a trick here and there's a catch, which is we license in the spaceport. We now need to go through a process to license the vehicles that will be launched from the spaceport. But that is something that is much easier now that we went through this process because we're defining the envelope of operations. So they'll name us as their spaceport and we'll provide the support for them also to go through this process. And actually, we can turn it around within 90 days. So if we submit the license today, three and a half months you'd have the paperwork done. Obviously, provided that you have the necessary analysis and necessarily safety cases and everything. That is remarkably fast. I'm just really impressed by that. It can be just a very slow process depending on where you are, but that is truly remarkable. So that is... I'll stress this again. It's one of the competitive advantages of the country itself. And it was made by the authorities with that purpose in mind. I mean, Portugal is a small country. We don't have those, you know, that much funding available to develop this kind of infrastructure. So the way to attract companies to come and fly with us, to come and launch with us, to come and operate and do their business in Portugal, which by the way obviously opens the market to the European Union and obviously all of that site also counts. But Portugal is using or trying to leverage the regulatory framework as a competitive advantage. And the Azores, because of their location, allows us to actually, you know, place the country in that situation because we only have to interface with ourselves in the sense that we're flying in a region that the only flight information region that I have to cater for is our own flight information region, which is basically a quarter of the Atlantic. And their traffic control controls for that region are actually on the island. So it's one single point of interface. So that means that the licensing process does not have to consult outside of Portugal for that matter, which means that I don't have to account for other people's airspaces and then coordinate and then wait for their replies and so on and so forth. So from that point of view, it's much easier to go through that process in Portugal. That is fascinating. Yeah, and you mentioned European spaceflight and Mabusco to me seems to represent an incredible opportunity for European space sovereignty and European spaceflight and launch. That's one thing that obviously given the current context in the world and the geopolitics, it's always in the back of our minds. We did not start this with that in mind as such because obviously we're open for business globally. We're placing the Atlantic Spaceport Consortium as an infrastructure operator in the sense that we want to potentially have multiple spaceports that we manage and that we operate in the same model that an airport operator operates multiple airports. We want the customers to be the equivalent of the airlines. They come, they launch, they fly, they do whatever they need to do. And we need to cater for those customers. And obviously, do you have the downstream customers like the payloads and again coming back to the reentry and so on and so forth. So we see ourselves as in another piece of that puzzle. The European sovereignty issue obviously is something that is being carefully looked at and we do believe we can provide that kind of support and obviously that kind of sovereignty and availability of one location that takes all the boxes from a European Union perspective. Let's see how things evolve. Obviously, fortunately, Europe has access to French Guiana from that point of view. It's not completely locked out of space. But we want obviously the Azores to provide some diversity and to enable that to go forward into the future. Yes, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. Well, I just wanted to make sure I give you sort of the last word. If there's anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention for the audience, I want to make sure that I give you that opportunity. Obviously, we are in a situation now where things are going to ramp up. We've not developed any kind of permanent infrastructure or anything yet because we did not have that license. Now with that license, we can go to the market in a different way. And that's obviously, I mean, market both ways. Market is catering for customers and the business development side of things. But also market from an investment perspective because we as I mentioned, we are not a country with a lot of funding. And obviously, even with funding within the EU, there's always mechanisms that probably take a little longer than they should. And we do not want to miss that window of opportunity. So we really want to try to understand how we can leverage the location, the licensing process that went through and see how we can potentially even raise some additional funds to go faster. I think going faster, going slower will depend a bit, not so much on us now, but also on the readiness of the vehicles. I mean, we are all, I think, globally waiting to see who comes next after SpaceX. And I think particularly in Europe, we don't have anybody yet that is really taking the data really ready to go into orbit. And I'm not talking about obviously the Ariane 6 and the Vegas that are flying from Peru. These will never launch from the Azores. That's not the aim. But the smaller launchers, we're waiting to see who comes up on top. And again, I stress that the sports may have a word in that with that regard in terms of the technology that they use. We've been flying a bit under the radar, if I may say so. I mean, we've been cautious about how we present ourselves and also how we approach the market because we have limitations and we know that the site has limitations. So we really cannot just go out there and advertise that we can support everything. But I also know that the launch providers in particular sometimes, and if you look at SpaceX, it's a good example. They want to control the whole vertical, so they control the end-to-end. Some launch providers do want to do that. But for a country like Portugal and for a region like the Azores, we could not commit to one single launch provider, even two. Because again, we don't know who's going to win. So we need to play it in a way that we're going to allow them to test things from the Azores, to test the technology, to do their first flights, maybe, maybe not. Some of them went to other space ports in the north of Europe. I think we'll be complementary to those space ports because, again, we don't know who's going to be flying. And we do not have space for everybody yet. The island itself is not that big, so we need to kind of manage that time and space allocation on the pads. If everything goes well, we'll pursue two pads in the mid-term future. We're not quite there yet. Let's see what will happen in the near future. It's exciting times. [Music] That is T-Minus Deep Space, brought to you by N2K Networks. We'd love to know what you think of our podcast. 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Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
