An agreement to be signed July 16 could lead to LauncherOne missions by Virgin Orbit flying out of Cornwall Airport Newquay, aka Spaceport Cornwall.

Plans to host the first orbital launches from the United Kingdom this year are moving ahead despite uncertainty about when regulators will grant licenses for those launches.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...