European Spaceflight
Places · Spaceport
SaxaVord Spaceport
The United Kingdom's vertical launch site, on the northernmost inhabited island in the country, aimed at polar orbits over the Norwegian Sea.
- Where
- Unst, Shetland Islands
- Coordinates
- 60.83°N 0.78°W
- Since
- 2025
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- saxavord.com
The sky from here
Measured at these coordinates the sky is zone 2: rural, which is Bortle 2–3 and a naked-eye limit of about magnitude 6.7–7.5. The Milky Way is structured and obvious. Light domes sit low on the horizon over distant towns, and the rest of the sky is genuinely dark.
Of the 110 Messier objects, 44 are an unaided-eye target from a sky this dark, 107 are comfortable in 10×50s and 107 in a 130mm reflector. There is nowhere darker worth driving to; this is already among the better skies on the planet.
For 125 nights of the year — 20 April to 22 August — the sky here never reaches astronomical darkness, because the Sun stays within eighteen degrees of the horizon all night. Distance from the nearest town makes no difference to that.
The centre of the galaxy only ever reaches 0° above the horizon from here, so the richest part of the Milky Way is always seen through the thickest air. It is the single biggest difference between this sky and one further south. Of the 110 Messier objects, 29 never set from here and 8 never rise.
Bode's Galaxy, Cigar Galaxy and Little Dumbbell pass close to the zenith from this latitude — an object at the zenith is being seen through the least air it will ever be seen through, and the difference against the same object low in the south is not subtle.
Spindle Galaxy, Owl Nebula and Pinwheel Galaxy never set from this latitude, so they are available on any clear night of the year rather than for one season of it.
Against that, Southern Pinwheel, Butterfly Cluster and Ptolemy's Cluster never clear the horizon here at all. No amount of aperture or patience changes that; the only remedy is to travel.
Read at 60.83°N 0.78°W. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
In the news
European Spaceflight
European Spaceflight
Nearby
Questions
What part of the sky never rises at SaxaVord Spaceport?
Everything south of declination −29°. From 60.8°N that is a cap 61° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 26% of the whole celestial sphere. Nothing about the calendar or the aperture changes that — the cap is below the horizon at every hour of every night. Its mirror image, the same 26% around the north celestial pole, is circumpolar here and never goes down.
How many hours of true darkness does SaxaVord Spaceport get?
Between nothing at all and 12 hours 39 minutes, depending entirely on the date. The longest night falls around 21 December; around 20 April there is no astronomical darkness at any hour, however far you get from the nearest town. The measure is astronomical darkness — the Sun a full eighteen degrees under — not simply the hours between sunset and sunrise.
What orbits can be reached from SaxaVord Spaceport?
Anything inclined at 60.8° or more, for free. A rocket launched due east from 60.8°N arrives in an orbit inclined at 60.8° — the shallowest the site can reach without spending propellant to turn the plane — and steeper orbits are simply a matter of launching on a different heading. That is already steeper than the Space Station's own 51.6°, so even reaching the Station from here means a dogleg rather than the straightforward case it is closer to the equator. What the latitude charges for is the other direction: a geostationary orbit sits at 0° inclination, and all 60.8° of the difference has to be bought back with propellant that could have been payload.
How far is SaxaVord Spaceport from the other sites on this map?
Its closest neighbour on this map is Jodrell Bank — the Lovell Telescope, 849 km away to the south. The nearest other spaceport is Andøya Spaceport, 1,220 km to the north-east. These are straight-line distances over the surface, not driving distances, and in this part of the world the two can differ considerably.