According to European Spacelight, Portugal’s Atlantic Spaceport Consortium has signed a cooperation agreement with NAV Portugal to support commercial feasibility testing of building a launch facility on the island of Santa Maria.
The Atlantic Spaceport Consortium (ASC) was founded in 2019 with the aim of building a commercial spaceport on the island of Santa Maria, approximately 1,500 kilometres off the coast of the Portuguese mainland. The consortium is entirely composed of the Portuguese companies Ilex Space and Optimal Structural Solutions.
On 13 August, ASC announced that it had signed a cooperation agreement with NAV Portugal, the country’s national air navigation service provider. NAV Portugal is responsible for managing and controlling air traffic within Portugal’s airspace.
Under the cooperation agreement, the pair aim to define the guidelines that a future spaceport will need to adhere to when launching from Santa Maria. This includes defining exclusion zones, examining how to monitor and authorize launch activities, and studying under what conditions to impose partial or total launch restrictions for safety reasons.
