Qualla: Inishnabro

Inishnabro: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eileen Henderson, CC BY-SA 2.0. In January 1973, a young American engineer walked into the office of the Irish Consul General in Chicago and asked, with apparent seriousness, whether Ireland might be interested in hosting a commercial spaceport. He had a specific island in mind. Inishnabro - Inis na Bro, the island of the quern stone - is a 49-hectare lump of rock off the western edge of County Kerry, separated from its neighbour Inishvickillane by a sound so narrow you could throw a hat across it. The cliffs on its northern coast are known as the Cathedral Rocks because they rise in arched columns like the nave of a Gothic church. No one lives there. No one has lived there in living memory. And yet for a few weeks in 1973, a small file marked Inishnabro circulated through the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs containing the words space shuttle.

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Image: Eileen Henderson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Inishnabro: The Cathedral Rocks

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Inishnabro rises to 229 metres at its highest point, a respectable Marilyn for an island you could walk across in under an hour. Approaching from the east, the green crown of grass and sea-pink ends abruptly at sheer northern cliffs that the early Irish-language tradition compare...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Inishnabro: A Visit to the Consul

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The American who showed up in Chicago was Gary Hudson, a young aerospace engineer who would later become a respected figure in the commercial space industry. In 1973 he was selling an idea that, by his own framing, brought together some impressive names: the British astronomer Si...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Inishnabro: The Reply

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Back at the Department of Foreign Affairs, the file did not survive the cool air of an Irish civil service summer. Officials concluded that whatever Hudson's objective might be, the scheme he had propounded to Mr Farrell in Chicago belonged mainly to the realms of science fiction...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Inishnabro: An Island That Wasn't

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. It is hard to read the Inishnabro file today without imagining the parallel future the civil servants quietly declined. Picture the launch towers rising above the Cathedral Rocks. Picture the auks scattering. Picture the contrails arcing east from Kerry over the Atlantic. None of...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Inishnabro: Reading the Map

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. From the air, Inishnabro looks like a comma between Inishvickillane and the open ocean. It sits within the special protected area that covers five of the Blaskets - the protected designation excludes only Great Blasket itself - and within the Natura 2000 special area of conservat...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0