
How Britain beat the odds to achieve space flight, and then abandoned it - villaaston1
https://medium.com/lapsed-historian/an-empire-of-stars-d6b24f92cbc7
======
phobosdeimos
The UK was so broke in the 1970s they could barely keep their military budget
up, most importantly an independent nuclear deterrent. Superpower status was a
thing of the past. With Brexit coming up its insightful to read up on post WW2
British history and how it got itself into the EU.

~~~
RachelF
Britain's first attempt to get into the EU was vetoed by de Gaulle; a strange
was of repaying the UK's effort in getting France a permanent seat on the UN
security council in 1945.

~~~
achamayou
Twice in fact, in 63 and 67. His motivations, which he explained at length in
a press conference that’s easy to find online were that the U.K. was only
interested in a strictly limited free trade union, and wanted an extremely
bespoke deal, excluding farming etc.

That never really changed, although Britain eventually gave up most of these
conditions, when they finally joined.

~~~
Bric3d
And also that he viewed the UK as a pawn of the US.

~~~
ionised
Seems he was correct in this too.

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fractalwrench
The Isle of Wight test facility is free to visit, it's worth a look if you're
in the area. There isn't a massive amount left - just the concrete structure
and a lot of rabbits grazing the cliffs below.

However, there's enough left to make you slightly sad that the space race
didn't end up in colonisation (yet). There are also a bunch of other features
within less than a mile (an old military battery, The Needles, great views
over The Solent, the colored sands of Alum Bay). Definitely underrated.

~~~
BenjaminDyer
Agreed, its a good place to explore! I live on the Isle of Wight, its full of
interesting historical places. I'd like to discover the Nuclear bunker but yet
to find it!

~~~
arethuza
This one?

[http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/sites/v/ventnor/](http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/sites/v/ventnor/)

~~~
BenjaminDyer
Thats the one!

I used to actually work in radar on the Isle of Wight, lots of people think of
it as simply a place for tourists and old people. However, at least to
recently, its the home of a lot of the worlds greatest radar and antenna
designers. Sadly its all in decline now.

~~~
arethuza
I'm looking forward to the Corstorphine Hill bunker in Edinburgh opening to
the public:

[https://en-gb.facebook.com/BarntonQuarryRestorationProject/](https://en-
gb.facebook.com/BarntonQuarryRestorationProject/)

It was the Scottish National HQ though I doubt it was that survivable as its
location was fairly well known.

------
izacus
Considering the fact that UK is a rather largeish (4th largest) contributor to
ESA (which operates Arianne programme and several other scientific programs),
does it make sense to say they "abandoned it"?

It seems more like they pooled resources with other European countries to make
a meaningful space programme.

~~~
macintux
Several years passed before the ESA was founded, and the UK didn't join until
later, so I would say it was abandoned.

~~~
jamiewildehk
After Blue Streak was cancelled the UK joined up with other European countries
to form ELDO, which was in some ways the precursor to ESA
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Launcher_Development_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Launcher_Development_Organisation)

~~~
macintux
Good point, didn't know that.

I'd still characterize the program as abandoned: abruptly cut all funding,
everyone left for other work.

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matthewmacleod
The UK does have a remarkable habit of abandoning its lead in advanced
technologies for rather short-sighted reasons. Nuclear power and high-speed
rail, among others.

~~~
pjc50
Same thing is playing out at present with wave power.

The Treasury is the usual suspect here, but there's a systematic lack of
vision at high level in both the state and private sectors. Engineering
doesn't get the same respect as making a fortune from land ownership.

~~~
londons_explore
To be fair, wave power is looking awfully expensive when compared to wind
power...

Not quite sure why, since nearly every wave power device is just a carefully
shaped bit of concrete dropped into the sea and some generators.

I could make you a 500 watt wave power device in an afternoon and $500 in
materials (big plastic oil drum as an air reservoir, big concrete weight,
hobby jet engine expander as the air to electricity convertor), and within a
year it would have paid for it's materials cost (at wind subsidy rates).

(I'm excluding the cost of a power interconnect to land here, but the cost of
these scales favourably, so ends up not being a big fraction of the project
cost for big projects).

Yet somehow commercial projects seem to have decades of payback time even when
given significant electricity subsidies.

~~~
pjc50
A bit of googling finds a detailed cost breakdown for the Pelamis system:
[http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/tna/+/http:/www.dt...](http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/tna/+/http:/www.dti.gov.uk/renewables/publications/pdfs/v0600197.pdf/)

Would the plastic oil drum solution even last a year? A big problem with these
things is that the sea is a corrosive fluid with a lot of kinetic energy in
it, and it tends to destroy things.

------
Symmetry
Black Arrow's engines had a very remarkable design. For booster stages on
space rockets you really need some sort of pump to get a high enough chamber
pressure. Most rockets due this by burning some of the fuel and oxidizer in a
turbine, wasting a bit of fuel. What Black Arrow did was use the decomposition
of the high test peroxide to power the pump and then putting all of the result
into the combustion chamber. Sort of like a staged combustion engine but
developed much earlier. You'll always have worse efficiency with peroxide than
with liquid oxygen but it was some very clever engineering.

------
gaius
That’s not quite the full story tho’. Where’s the bit about NASA is promising
to launch British payloads at a huge discount then reneging the instant Black
Arrow was cancelled? _That’s_ why the Treasury was fooled into not supporting
it.

~~~
ajross
I've actually never heard that bit. Is there a link?

But the US was hardly the only player in the game. This was 1971, the
technology side of the space race was winding down, and ESA/Ariane launch
capability was right around the corner. I don't think "British" satellites
really suffered much in the market for this decision in hindsight.

~~~
gsnedders
ESA wasn't founded till 1973, and Ariane 1 doesn't fly until the end of 1979.

ELDO is more relevant here, as the Europa rocket was a joint project (of which
Britain was a major part; it was partly based on the Blue Streak ICBM).

~~~
masklinn
OTOH the UK had _left_ ELDO to focus on Black Arrow (hence the replacement of
the old Blue Streak stage by Diamant's, and possibly the move from Woomera to
Kourou)

~~~
gsnedders
It _sort of_ left in the mid-60s, AFAIK. (Still, by the end, almost a third of
the funding for Europa was British.)

------
kowdermeister
At least one big thing is yet to come out of Britan:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_\(spacecraft\))

~~~
Steve44
It doesn't mention it in the article but the design of Skylon is very
reminiscent of the Skylon artwork installed for The Festival Of Britain in
1951.

[https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/walk-
roun...](https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/walk-round-
festival-britain-upstream-circuit/) has quite a few good pictures. Deep image
[https://alondoninheritance.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/Fe...](https://alondoninheritance.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/Festival-of-Britain-8-638x1024.jpg)

This was on the Southbank, near where the London Eye currently is.

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canada_dry
A bit like Canada's Avro Arrow... state-of-the-art jet fighter that put 15,000
ppl out of work when it got shelved (10 years before this happened in
England).

~~~
tolien
The UK's equivalent was probably the cancellation of the TSR 2 [1] that nearly
put BAC (predecessor to the current BAE Systems 800lb gorilla) out of
business, with the same argument as for the Avro Arrow that manned aircraft
wouldn't be needed soon because computers and missiles would make them
obsolete (c.f. drones more recently).

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2)

~~~
crdb
They destroyed the tooling and already built prototypes as fast as they could.
In particular:

> The only airframe ever to fly, XR219, along with the completed XR221 and
> part completed XR223 were taken to Shoeburyness and used as targets to test
> the vulnerability of a modern airframe and systems to gunfire and shrapnel.

It was not just a project that was "cancelled" but an industry. At least the
Olympus made it to the Concorde.

~~~
tolien
It’s implied that the Arrow was destroyed quite so completely to stop the
Soviets getting their hands on any useful knowledge.

Olympus was being used in the Vulcan and the 593 project started in order to
produce engines for Concorde a year [1] before the TSR 2 was canned, so it
wasn’t as if they could take those engines away.

Avro Canada were in trouble, and killing the project was the beginning of the
end for them but it’s not as if they were the only ones. Hawker Siddeley (the
TSR 2) wound up owned by BAC in 1977 and Bristol/Bristol Siddeley (Olympus
engines) was bought by Rolls-Royce in 1966 (then Rolls were liquidated/state
owned by 1971), so things did not go well for them either.

Orenda (manufacturer of the Iroquois) still exists, albeit as a sister company
of Bristol Aerospace [2], and Bombardier joined together the remnants of
Canadair, Short Brothers, Learjet and de Havilland Canada. It’s not like
Canada doesn’t have any aerospace industry left.

My point, if there was one, was that the 50s-70s was a time when the aviation
industry went through huge change worldwide, and everyone seemed to have the
same short-sighted view that automation/missiles would eat the world
(narrator: it didn’t).

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-
Royce_Olympus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Olympus)

2:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_Aerospace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_Aerospace)

------
jcloud_dev
The British are thankfully regaining the ability for space launches. There is
a new spaceport being built in UK and a number of companies that plan on using
it.

~~~
JoeDaDude
Yes indeed! Godspeed, Brits!

[http://thespacereview.com/article/3540/1](http://thespacereview.com/article/3540/1)

------
drdeadringer
Years ago I read an alternate-history comic book series regarding a massively
successful British space program. It was an entertaining and enjoyable read.

"Ministry Of Space",
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Space)

------
tabtab
As far as the early failures, USA had a similar learning curve. For example,
it took 7 tries before the first successful Ranger probe, which took photos of
the moon on an intentional suicide mission in order to get roughly 1-foot
resolution. But along the way they perfected techniques such as clean-rooms,
telemetry, and redundancy.

It seems newbies often try to do too much. For example, an early Soviet Mars
probe carried a mini-rover. It was overly bold: they should have kept it
simple at the time, putting survivability over gizmos. Add fancy stuff on
later missions after the basics are perfected. This incremental approach
worked well for Soviet Venus probes. Early Japanese probes similarly tried to
do too much too early.

------
chr15p
If you're looking for a reasonably technical (but not completely rocket
science!) history of the British space programme A Vertical Empire by C. N.
Hill is really good, although, as a Brit, also quite depressing as you realise
what might have been [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vertical-Empire-History-
Programme-1...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vertical-Empire-History-
Programme-1950-1971/dp/1860942687)

------
Retric
These things had a ~100kg payload to LEO which is tiny in terms of space
flight. For comparison a Falcon 9 v1.0 could take 100 times as much stuff into
LEO and a Falcon Heavy can take 630 times as much stuff into LEO.

So it was a solid demonstrator of capability, but Briton would have needed to
spend quite a bit on R&D to scale these things up.

~~~
jimnotgym
And with only 47 years to do it in...

~~~
Retric
I am more referencing desired capacity. A Saturn V could get 1,400x as much
into LEO in 1967 but that's far larger than most people really needed.

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netgusto
A video by Curious Droid presenting the whole dossier:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHBGAyIU8Hw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHBGAyIU8Hw)

------
StringyBob
and sadly the UK government is doing it again via brexit - not just via the
loss of input to galileo, but killing UK based space companies and research.
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/23/uk_lords_tell_uk_go...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/23/uk_lords_tell_uk_gov_brexit_is_bad_for_space/)

------
bitwize
"Well, we've done it, lads. We've been to space. Jolly good show, everyone.
Now maybe those bloody Yanks won't rub our noses in it at the next NATO
meeting."

"Shall we start planning for the next mission, guv?"

"Next mission?"

"Well, we _are_ going back, aren't we?"

"Back? To space? Naw, mate, we just went to say we've been. 'Aven't got the
quid to piss away on going _back_. We'll leave that to the bloody Yanks, let
_them_ deal with the mess up there."

