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How Britain beat the odds to achieve space flight, and then abandoned it
- senthil_rajasek 8y agoToo bad they did not have the colonies to financially support their space ambitions.
- bmmayer1 8y agoThis is a weird and unrelated comment.
- rad_gruchalski 8y agoWhy is it unrelated? Britain has exploited some nations in not so distant past. That’s where the wealth of the Imperium came from...
- sgt101 8y agoNot the industrial revolution?
- cjbenedikt 8y agoAnd that's related to a space program because....??? Oh, it isn't!
- riazrizvi 8y agoThe article finishes with > She is a last, lonely piece of Empire, in a Super-powered sky.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoIronically, New Zealand, a former colony, has an active rocket launch facility.
- skrebbel 8y agoHalf the world's launch facilities are in former British colonies.
- dotancohen 8y agoThat's not a difficult statistic to attain when Britan has invaded ~90% of the worlds nations: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/nov/06/british-invaded-90-per-cent-world https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/nov/06/britis... It seems that only 22 countries and territories have escape British invasion. Yay Mongolia!
- skrebbel 8y agoThat was sortof my point. GP singled out New Zealand which I thought was a bit odd given British imperial history. But hey, totally picking nits.
- gaius 8y agoThat’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.
- DrLevingston 8y agoOnce again the US is blamed for everyone's woes and troubles. Not sure what you're talking about, but it seems like a poor excuse for not having a successful space program.
- gsnedders 8y agoThat was far from the only thing that led to its cancellation; another was that there simply wasn't a need to launch enough to prove the launch vehicle. FWIW, the report that led to its cancellation was written by William Penney, who had led the British nuclear programme.
- gaius 8y agothe report that led to its cancellation was written by William Penney Civil Servants often get it badly wrong, Beeching for example. Or who was that other bungler that killed off AI? The U.K. could have been leading the world in both aerospace and computing today if it wasn’t for those Latin-verb-conjugating clowns.
- gsnedders 8y agoIf someone else had been given Beeching's job (make British Rail stop losing money, hand-over-fist), what would they have recommended instead of mass closures? While they might have differed in what they suggested closing, I don't think the outcome would've been all that different.
- Lio 8y agoThey could have kept the land the routes ran over though. One of the reasons Beaching gets so much blame is that not only did he close lines he sold parts of them off for little return so that they couldn’t be reopened without compulsory purchase orders because they've been built on. Today we could massively improve our transport infrastructure if that hadn’t happened.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fractalwrench 8y agoThe 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.
- mkohlmyr 8y agoI've been to the batteries and I have absolutely no recollection of hearing of this bit of history. Perhaps I was too taken in by the landscape. Underrated indeed, a second visit is in order!
- fiftyacorn 8y agoTheres a Black Knight rocket at Chambers Street Museum in Edinburgh https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/collection-search-results/?item_id=219433 https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/collection-sea...
- BenjaminDyer 8y agoAgreed, 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 8y agoThis one? http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/sites/v/ventnor/ http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/sites/v/ventnor/
- BenjaminDyer 8y agoThats 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.
- jcloud_dev 8y agoThe 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 8y agoYes indeed! Godspeed, Brits! http://thespacereview.com/article/3540/1 http://thespacereview.com/article/3540/1
- randombrit123 8y agoIf there was a god, Britain wouldn't exist (due to their past colonial cruelty).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- steve_musk 8y agoNeither would most of the world lol.
- tshanmu 8y agoif you go far enough any fair sized empire was a coloniser! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonies_in_antiquity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonies_in_antiquity [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Southeast_Asia#Indianised_kingdoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Southeast_Asia#Indi... edit: Fixed line breaks
- Symmetry 8y agoBlack 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.
- canada_dry 8y agoA 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).
- arethuza 8y agoWe also had the TSR-2 - dropped in favour of the F-111 which we didn't get either! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2
- tolien 8y agoThe 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 8y agoThey 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 8y agoIt’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
- netgusto 8y agoA video by Curious Droid presenting the whole dossier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHBGAyIU8Hw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHBGAyIU8Hw
- Retric 8y agoThese 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 8y agoAnd with only 47 years to do it in...
- Retric 8y agoI 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.
- mikeash 8y agoThat’s a similar payload to the modern Electron rocket. There’s a good market for launching small satellites. Much more so today than in 1970, of course.
- Retric 8y agoFair point, though the Electron rocket has 2 launches and 1 successful so I am not sure how large the market is. The problem is you can generally stuff 2+ payloads into a single rocket which means small payloads can usually find some spare capacity on another launch at a discount. However, you can't really scale up a rocket that's not large enough.
- mikeash 8y agoLooks like they have a decent number of flights booked for the near future. It’s not a huge market, but there are small satellites that need to be in a unique orbit or can’t wait around for a matching payload to ride with. Time will tell just how big of a market that really is.
- captain_perl 8y ago"Great Britain" is a pathetic, bankrupt nation. It's been a has-been since 1940 or earlier. Bleating about its failed space program is laughable at best, considering even the Falklands War was a stretch. The only thing Britain has going for it today is the City of London, a money-laundering haven.
- banhfun 8y agoAre you French by any chance?
- nasredin 8y agoThe British have been annoying the French for at least a millennia. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7881207-1000-years-of-annoying-the-french https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7881207-1000-years-of-an...
- pyrale 8y agoWe don't really piss the british off anymore these days. They have shown the ability to take care of themselves in that regard. That and the fact that the US don't show enough self-awareness to sport a meaningful rivalry are the reason the French are an overall depressed bunch.
- dtf 8y agoAhem... The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, if you please (for the time being, at least).
- ajeet_dhaliwal 8y agoYou are right about the lack of diversity with respect to the economy and a general over inflated sense of importance. The second in particular is something I only noticed after a long time spent living elsewhere, my friends that haven’t lived elsewhere don’t see it that way. The U.K. is headed to becoming a firmly middle sized economy over the long term but friends in London often act as though they’re almost the USA or almost China.
- bitwize 8y ago"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."
- phobosdeimos 8y agoThe 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.
- nextos 8y agoSadly, Brexit will bring some cuts to UK research. And to projects like EUROATOM, where UK is a major contributor and host. It seems we haven't learned much from history.
- UncleSlacky 8y agoThe UK has a lot of previous form in that department - the TSR-2 (cancelled in favour of the F-111) and the Miles M.52 (blueprints given to the US and formed the basis of the Bell X-1 design) to name but two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_M.52 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_M.52
- imbokodo 8y agoIt costs money to intern Irish patriots without trial in your colony's concentration camps
- dang 8y agoWould you please not post ideological battle comments to HN? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The problem isn't your views, it's that this sort of thing leads to flamewars that take over discussion completely if we let it. The idea on HN is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
- RachelF 8y agoBritain'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.
- matthewmacleod 8y agoThe 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 8y agoSame 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 8y agoTo 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.
- marcosdumay 8y agoConcrete usage seems to be a major cost predictor for anything that is not construction. That's probably because if you need a lot of concrete it's because whatever you create will face a lot of stress (thus more and more expensive material and shorter life).
- toyg 8y agoThe comparison with wind is not strictly relevant, since the UK is basically abandoning that too - in favour of nuclear, an industry that pays better kickback for the politicians making decisions.
- izacus 8y agoConsidering 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 8y agoSeveral years passed before the ESA was founded, and the UK didn't join until later, so I would say it was abandoned.
- jamiewildehk 8y agoAfter 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_Organisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Launcher_Development_...
- macintux 8y agoGood point, didn't know that. I'd still characterize the program as abandoned: abruptly cut all funding, everyone left for other work.
- pjc50 8y agoAnd then abandoned that: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-europe-space-agency-braces-brexit.html https://phys.org/news/2018-01-europe-space-agency-braces-bre...
- detritus 8y agoExcept we're not - it says it right there in the article you linked, trying to suggest otherwise.. "But Britain will likely stay in the ESA, which is autonomous from the European Union." A lot of us aren't particularly happy about Brexit, but please don't dilute the issue with flustered misinformation. -ed I mean, heck - Canada's part of the ESA!
- kowdermeister 8y agoAt 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 8y agoIt 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-round-festival-britain-upstream-circuit/ https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/walk-roun... has quite a few good pictures. Deep image https://alondoninheritance.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Festival-of-Britain-8-638x1024.jpg https://alondoninheritance.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Fe... This was on the Southbank, near where the London Eye currently is.
- avmich 8y agoWhich was developed by some members of Black Arrow team.
- dforte98 8y agoBrexit being brexit
- _pRwn_ 8y agolet's be clear here: the Germans reached space first, it was their technology ... reaching space (or the moon) with the help of captured German scientists or hardware is not an achievement
- exHFguy1 8y agoBig difference between lobbing bomb briefly into space and putting someone on the moon. How many innovations between the first thing and the second? I will give you many same people involved.
- thekingofh 8y agoThe Germans had copied Goddard's, an American's, liquid rocket design and expanded upon it. These are Von Braun's words when speaking about Goddard: "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles" also: "He once recalled that "Goddard's experiments in liquid fuel saved us years of work, and enabled us to perfect the V-2 years before it would have been possible" And if you don't believe me, here's Goddard's patent for a liquid fueled and a multi-stage rocket. Exactly what put a man on the moon: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1103503 https://patents.google.com/patent/US1103503 https://patents.google.com/patent/US1102653 https://patents.google.com/patent/US1102653
- avmich 8y agoAgree, the Germans technology was improved to levels which don't allow to call the results the Germans technology.
- thekingofh 8y agoWell it was a continuation that would have happened with or without the Germans, but they had made significant gains that we're a natural fit for the aspirations of the two blossoming superpowers at the time. The difficulty in getting to the moon was so vast that the statement that only Germans did it was just strange. German knowledge was a key part to a very large rocket initiative. It was going to happen, but faster with German help. By the way, it turns out that all the money the Germans spent on the V-2 was wasted since it took money from other programs that might have helped them with the war effort. So one could say that spending it on rockets was a bit premature.
- drdeadringer 8y agoYears 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
- StringyBob 8y agoand 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_gov_brexit_is_bad_for_space/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/23/uk_lords_tell_uk_go...
- tabtab 8y agoAs 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 8y agoIf 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-1950-1971/dp/1860942687 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vertical-Empire-History-Programme-1...