Re: Oh. Again?
I doubt you will ever see one of these rockets being prepped on the tarmac at Heathrow or any other major passenger airport. Liquid rocket fuel is often pretty nasty stuff, so you would have all kinds of environmental concerns. Plus most all of your major international airports are near or even have takeoff corridors happening over heavily populated neighborhoods.
Nobody wants to be the major airport that has something happen and the rocket ends up piling into some residential subdivision.
There are a number of less-constricted fields with long runways, including a number of recently retired military airbases. If I recall correctly, Virgin Orbit has an arrangement to fly out of Anderson AFB in Guam. Anderson has runways used for B-52 strikes during the Vietnam War. Plus Virgin Orbit needs to be pretty near the ocean, since they don't want to launch over land, especially somewhat populated land. So even Heathrow would probably be too far from the Atlantic (a couple hundred miles) to really work for Virgin.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
