How Britain beat the odds to achieve space flight, and then abandoned it

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.

The Isle of Wight test facility is free to visit, it&#x27;s worth a look if you&#x27;re in the area. There isn&#x27;t a massive amount left - just the concrete structure and a lot of rabbits grazing the cliffs below.<p>However, there&#x27;s enough left to make you slightly sad that the space race didn&#x27;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.

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 &quot;abandoned it&quot;?<p>It seems more like they pooled resources with other European countries to make a meaningful space programme.

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.

Black Arrow&#x27;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&#x27;ll always have worse efficiency with peroxide than with liquid oxygen but it was some very clever engineering.

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? <i>That’s</i> why the Treasury was fooled into not supporting it.

At least one big thing is yet to come out of Britan:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Skylon_(spacecraft)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Skylon_(spacecraft)</a>

A bit like Canada&#x27;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).

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.

Years ago I read an alternate-history comic book series regarding a massively successful British space program. It was an entertaining and enjoyable read.<p>&quot;Ministry Of Space&quot;, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ministry_of_Space" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ministry_of_Space</a>

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.<p>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.

If you&#x27;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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;Vertical-Empire-History-Programme-1950-1971&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1860942687" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;Vertical-Empire-History-Programme-1...</a>

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

A video by Curious Droid presenting the whole dossier: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FHBGAyIU8Hw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FHBGAyIU8Hw</a>

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. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;23&#x2F;uk_lords_tell_uk_gov_brexit_is_bad_for_space&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;23&#x2F;uk_lords_tell_uk_go...</a>

&quot;Well, we&#x27;ve done it, lads. We&#x27;ve been to space. Jolly good show, everyone. Now maybe those bloody Yanks won&#x27;t rub our noses in it at the next NATO meeting.&quot;<p>&quot;Shall we start planning for the next mission, guv?&quot;<p>&quot;Next mission?&quot;<p>&quot;Well, we <i>are</i> going back, aren&#x27;t we?&quot;<p>&quot;Back? To space? Naw, mate, we just went to say we&#x27;ve been. &#x27;Aven&#x27;t got the quid to piss away on going <i>back</i>. We&#x27;ll leave that to the bloody Yanks, let <i>them</i> deal with the mess up there.&quot;