Founder of Saxavord spaceport diagnosed with terminal cancer
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Frank Strange, the founder and CEO of the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands, yesterday revealed that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and is given about six months to two years to live.
He said he was hopeful to be present for what could be the first orbital rocket launch from UK soil now expected to happen in November of this year.
Speaking to Shetland News on Thursday, the 67-year-old said the future of the spaceport was in good hands with a highly capable management team and very supportive investors.
Reflecting on his health, Strang said he had been struggling eating over past months. An endoscopy a few weeks ago discovered a tumour in his oesophagus (gullet) which was found to be cancerous and had also spread to the lungs. “I am going to step back but not down,” he said. “If I step down that would probably kill me before the cancer does.
“The spaceport has been my life; it has come at a high personal cost over the years.”
It would truly be a tragedy if this man dies before the first launch at Saxavord occurs. The German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg had hoped to do a launch there last year, but an explosion during a prelaunch static fire test made that impossible. It hopes to try again in December, assuming the United Kingdom’s odious red tape does not get in the way.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Frank Strange, the founder and CEO of the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands, yesterday revealed that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and is given about six months to two years to live.
He said he was hopeful to be present for what could be the first orbital rocket launch from UK soil now expected to happen in November of this year.
Speaking to Shetland News on Thursday, the 67-year-old said the future of the spaceport was in good hands with a highly capable management team and very supportive investors.
Reflecting on his health, Strang said he had been struggling eating over past months. An endoscopy a few weeks ago discovered a tumour in his oesophagus (gullet) which was found to be cancerous and had also spread to the lungs. “I am going to step back but not down,” he said. “If I step down that would probably kill me before the cancer does.
“The spaceport has been my life; it has come at a high personal cost over the years.”
It would truly be a tragedy if this man dies before the first launch at Saxavord occurs. The German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg had hoped to do a launch there last year, but an explosion during a prelaunch static fire test made that impossible. It hopes to try again in December, assuming the United Kingdom’s odious red tape does not get in the way.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
There are times that I wonder if God any hates human interest at all in spaceflight and astronomy.
Stephan Hawking dared peek into the firmament and was struck down.
Astronaut Husband was ashamed of having fibbed on a form…
https://ablogaboutnothinginparticular.com/rick-husband/
Korolev died before N-1 was perfected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_I8Y5gjIpE
Glushko passed after his rocket fly twice before the USSR.
Jack Parsons–inventor of cast solids–was an out-and-out diabolist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons
And now–we have this crud:
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-space-exploration-democratic-equitable-potential.html
Sigh…I can’t win.
Jeff, I don’t think Korolev had much to do with the N-1 but it would have been nice for him to have seen it fly successfully. Nevertheless he is commemorated every time a Soyuz rocket is launched and the boosters separate to form the “Korolev Cross” in the sky.
As for that last link, barf.
I’m not surprised by the Brit bureaucracy. After the Second World War the Brit aviation bureaucracy decided they would rather have a bureaucracy than a light aircraft industry and completely succeeded in that goal.
We should all be happy.
There are more LV options than ever before–and yet, there is this funeraial pall.
In the 1990s, things seemed to be looking up–when all we had was shuttle and Delta IIs and the occasional Atlas/Titan.
I think that–before 2001 (when we were still thinking Space Odyssey, not 9/11) we still felt like maybe there would be an outside chance of having at least one of Kubrick’s craft work–after a fashion.
Each decade of the 20th Century had its own vibe….Gangs of New York to biplanes…the Roaring 20s… Depression 30’s…WWII 40’s…rock and roll 50’s…peace and love 60’s….then…the dismal 70’s, the Me Generation 80’s.
Post 2000… everything seems frozen.
The same time period elapsed between Carpenter ‘s THE THING and 2011’s “pre-make” that elapsed between Thing from Another World and Carpenter’s re-imagining.
Everything seems..stale now.
Elon needed to pop up in the 1980’s
Jeff Wright,
Been seeing a fair amount of stuff like that at your last link lately. Reader’s Digest condensed version: You owe us. Gimme.
It’s almost as though there is finally a dim sense on the part of the Left and its third-world mau-mau chorus that the jig is pretty much up. Hence, the effort to gin up all of the old talk of colonialism and entitlement one more time in the hope of forestalling the inevitable and maybe getting a last payday or two out of Western neurotic guilt before it evaporates entirely.
But old whines in new bottles are finding fewer and fewer takers. The Grasshutistans of the world have behaved badly enough since their “liberation from colonialism” in the 1960s that nobody is much interested anymore in whether any of them lives or dies.
Especially as we have seen far too much of this dysfunction up close and personal in our own cities and towns courtesy – if that’s the word – of the Biden regime’s effort to submerge Americans in an unvetted sea of invited invaders. We don’t have to read about perpetual trouble in far-off Grasshutistans anymore – there are “refugee” Grasshutistanis in plenty doing their things down at 3rd and Elm – at least until Tom Homan lays them by the heels.
As Islam, in particular, runs out of money and as the USN retreats from its post-WW2 mission of making the high seas safe and relatively frictionless for the commerce of everyone – Grasshutistans and the PRC included – more of the world’s least pleasant places will inevitably see their populations die back to the relatively low maximum occupancies they could sustain a couple or three centuries back.
Meanwhile, actual industrial civilization will spread in the universe, leaving such atavistic peculiarities of social organization as Marxism, tribalism and Islam to their richly deserved dwindlings into irrelevance and oblivion.
The future’s so bright we’re gonna have to wear shades.
Jeff Wright,
“Elon needed to pop up in the 1980’s”
He did, under the name Robert Truax, who wanted to start a commercial launch company. Unfortunately, the U.S. government had actively inhibited commercial launch as well as commercial space operations. Somehow, the free-market capitalistic America had a government-controlled space industry, with increasing government control of more and more aspects of business and life.
“Stephan Hawking dared peek into the firmament and was struck down.”
Actually, he lived five decades longer than his doctors said he would, giving him the time needed to peek into that firmament.
“Korolev died before N-1 was perfected.”
But he made sure, while he lived, that the Soviet Union appeared to be winning the space race.
“In the 1990s, things seemed to be looking up–when all we had was shuttle and Delta IIs and the occasional Atlas/Titan.”
The 1990s was when the space industry was begging for lower-cost launch vehicles — that if launch to orbit could be reduced from $10K per pound to $2K, then the commercial space industry would be able to take off like no one could believe. In the 2010s, this prediction started to come true when SpaceX reduced the price to orbit to that price point. These days, commercial space is so prevalent and dominant that NASA is looking obsolete. Commercial space is spreading beyond the U.S. to many countries around the world.
What will happen when Starship reduces the cost to orbit another order of magnitude?
“Each decade of the 20th Century had its own vibe….Gangs of New York to biplanes…the Roaring 20s… Depression 30’s…WWII 40’s…rock and roll 50’s…peace and love 60’s….then…the dismal 70’s, the Me Generation 80’s.”
The the X-Prize 1990s…the private astronaut 2000s…the cubesat 2010s…the commercial manned space industry 2020s…next are the commercial space station 2030s and the Martian colony 2040s.
“Post 2000… everything seems frozen.”
Post 2004, everything is returning to free-market-capitalism and expanding rapidly with exciting private missions to space and the moon. It isn’t just the number of orbital launches that is increasing rapidly, it is also the mass of hardware that is going into space.
However, Jeff, if you are looking at Truth, Justice, and The American Way, then you are correct. Government took over those aspects of American life and suppressed them, post 2008.
“Everything seems..stale now.”
Everything is so very exciting, now. The real problem is that Frank Strange, like most of his generation and the generation before his, will not live to see the realization of the great dreams that Disney and von Braun had given us in the late 1950s and that Clark and Kubrick gave us in 1968.
NASA may be stale, trapped by Congress and presidents to repeat past glory rather than push forward with advanced technologies, but commercial space is now doing the technological advancements and the forward visions that we had expected of NASA ever since our last manned Moon mission. This is why SpaceX is so widely admired and watched. It is why Rocket Lab is doing so well. It is why investors are now eager to put money into commercial space companies.
If only NASA and the U.S. government had been forward looking and allowed commercial orbital launches and commercial space operations in the 1960s, or even in the 1980s, where would we be today? If only commercial space manufacturing had not been inhibited in the 1980s, we would be so very full of commercial space products that earthlings would be eager to expand space operations, not hinder it in favor of funding massive welfare projects that encourage sloth and envy, as Dick Eagleson noted.
From the beginning of the Space Age, the U.S. started becoming a dystopia, pretending to be a utopia, removing the best aspects of The American Way and replacing them with marxism. Our dystopia has now resulted in the first American generation (the current generation) that is not better off than the previous generation and is worse off. Four centuries of progress has been stifled by an increasingly marxist tyranny.
Now that we have the commercialization of space, we Americans are no longer satisfied with the growing dystopian society and are rejecting the false utopia in favor of the reality of imperfection with the aspiration of a better society. As our Constitution’s Preamble says, in order to seek a more perfect society, or as the Declaration of Independence promises, the pursuit of Happiness. The next generation should soon be back on track, to finally be better off than the previous generation (not just better than the current generation).
We should soon be able to rid ourselves of the devastation brought on by the marxist Great Society and New (Raw) Deal. In 2020 we saw that tyranny sucks, and We the People are now rejecting it in favor of Truth, Justice, and The American Way. We are seeing what We the People can do and what the government does not do for us. Ask not what the government can do for you, but ask what you can do for yourself and others. Keep the government as much out of it as possible. We can do so much more for ourselves and for each other than the government could possibly do — after all, government depends upon contractors — We the People — to do the things that it does “for” us. We can get so much more if we eliminate the government middle man; he is very expensive, and he supplies us with so much less than we can supply to each other.
The government reaction to the Wuhan flu showed us that government is worse than useless in almost every way. We gave our healthcare over to Obamacare, and it did so much worse in 2020 than previous novel flus, when commercial healthcare still held some power. We even see government regressing from the relatively modern Space Shuttle to Apollo technology. Government space gave us so little during the two-thirds of a century when it was dominant, but now, in only a couple of decades, we are quickly advancing so far beyond what government was able to do in triple the time.
The future is so brilliant we will have to wear sunglasses. (Where did I read that, recently?)
Jeff Wright,
Post 2000, everything is not “frozen.” Quite the opposite in fact. Things that were long-frozen – progress in space technology foremost among them – have shattered the ice and taken wing.
If you don’t see this it can only be because of your unreasonable attachment to the scene in your rearview mirror and your misperception that institutions now two and three generations beyond their “best if used by” dates are still as they were and have not become Pictures of Dorian Gray.