Business Secretary Vince Cable wants to make UK “the place for space”.
His plan is to grab a 10% share of the global space sector currently dominated by the US, Russia and Japan by establishing a UK version of Cape Canaveral.
But that’s easier said than done and, with a timescale of just four years, it means the UK’s spaceport will not be purpose-built; it will be an adaptation of an existing aerodrome facility.
Scotland is home to six of the eight sites which have been earmarked as potential locations.
They include Stornoway Airport, Kinloss Barracks, Prestwick, Campbeltown, Lossiemouth and RAF Leuchars in Fife.
A quick assessment of those locations probably rules out Stornoway and Kinloss on the basis of their runways being too short to allow reusable spacecraft to take off and land.
I think you could probably tick off another in Scottish Government owned Prestwick. The ailing airport is in need of some good news right now after its only scheduled carrier, Ryanair, announced it was shifting the bulk of its operations to Glasgow but I still see its future lying more in Majorca than Mars.
So in my estimation that leaves Campbeltown which was once a major Cold War strategic base, sold off by the UK Ministry of Defence for £1 in 2012 to a community collective Leuchars and Lossiemouth.
From that little grouping, RAF Lossiemouth is the obvious front-runner.
To my knowledge, it is the only one of the Scottish sites which has previously been linked with the space race.
In 2008 Edinburgh-born Will Whitehorn, often described as Virgin tycoon Richard Branson’s right-hand man, took a little day trip to Moray.
He was then president of the space tourism company Virgin Galactic, and it was not nostalgia that drove him to visit his homeland.
He wanted to see for himself what Lossiemouth had to offer.
At the time, Mr Whitehorn told the BBC that Virgin Galactic planned to have a main base in New Mexico with three satellite (excuse the pun) bases around the world.
Mr Whitehorn said north Scotland was the only area of Britain which offered the right conditions for a spaceport development, with a relatively small local population on the ground and few other aircraft operating in the vicinity.
Again, to my knowledge, Mr Whitehorn did not visit Fife and he did not take in Argyll and Bute on his fact-finding mission.
But suppose for a minute that Leuchars is a real contender for the UK’s first spaceport.
It has the infrastructure required the runway is long enough and in good enough shape to handle the largest of aircraft and it certainly has the potential for development, with the RAF set to quit the base in the coming months (intriguingly the air aces are destined for Lossiemouth).
And after years of test flights from screaming Tornado jets, the local population is unlikely to baulk at a little aerial activity overhead.
Assuming the myriad safety and technical issues could be overcome, I suspect the more likely scenario would be a sense of relief at seeing significant economic activity retained at the base and excitement at the prospect of having a gateway to final frontier on the doorstep.
I can’t say that I expect it to happen in fact, I suspect the prospect of a Scottish spaceport may be little more than the UK Government dangling a pre-referendum carrot but the child in me that was so fascinated by space exploration and stories of endeavour would love it to.
So let the countdown begin Cape Cupar is go!