How Britain beat the odds to achieve space flight, and then abandoned it
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That never really changed, although Britain eventually gave up most of these conditions, when they finally joined.
And then still left eventually (well, this is in progress) because of exactly these reasons. De Gaulle was absolutely right on this.
What an accurate analisys of a major geopolitical event!
Sadly he was maybe a little too good at it, because now my country is frozen in an incessant quest to find a new De Gaulle; we can't accept the idea that politician - even president - are flawed and make mistakes, so we call all of them "bad", "wrong choice", ... That's why our president always have rock bottom public opinion.
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.
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.
https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/collection-sea...
[0] https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/the-needles-old-battery-and...
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.
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.
It seems more like they pooled resources with other European countries to make a meaningful space programme.
I'd still characterize the program as abandoned: abruptly cut all funding, everyone left for other work.
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!
As a EU citizen, I worry that a fierce competitor (and in some aspects a potential foe) is going to be (mis-?) using EU infrastructure.
Why would the EU choose to be put at a disadvantage by giving the UK more negotiating tokens? We have seen that the UK tries to advance negotiations in some areas by using leverage from other areas. Which is fine, it is part of the game. Let's just avoid falling into more traps.
The underlying problem is that of trust: trust is not the right tool to build international relationships: independent institutions must be there to arbitrate whenever disputes arise. But the UK refuses to be held to account. It is thus an unreliable partner.
Really? Crikey, I had no idea paranoia ran so deep on the European side[1]. Would you care to expand on why Britain apparently refuses to be held to account? As far as I'm aware, Britain is one of the most compliant members of the EU ruleset - aside from our much mentioned and ascribed financial concessions[2], our government doesn't tend to bend the rules to its own whims, as is often the case in France, Spain and Germany (re: abuse of subsidies and stature to corporate behemoths to go on spending sprees on infrastructure concerns in other EU states, in energy and construction in particular).
Galileo is a seperate concern - an EU project whose delivery will be overseen by ESA - and I appreciate the use of it as a pawn in the Brexit negotiations. However, that does somewhat fly in the face of the FrancoAnglo drive towards military cooperation anad partnership, which given the spend and reach of the two largest military EU nations, would make sense to not toy with too much.
To then go further and view the UK as a foe, whereas prior it was seen as a jigsaw-fit partner (we don't have any launch capability or ambitions to do so otherwise) seems .. well, as I said - paranoid.
Brexit's division is not so much divisory as putting a foot down. It's a sentiment shared across Europe, and not acknowledging that is dangerous, I think.
Anyway, love from the UK - we're not out to get you - I think we're just keeping trying to keep our options open.
[1] I don't for a minute think it does - my partner and most of my friends are European and this whole Brexit mess is a frequent topic of conversation. Your stance here is the first I've come across that draws things in such stark, 'cold war' terms. I wonder if you hold the same opinion of the classes in France, Italy and Germany who are as equally unkeen on the European government? Is Britain somehow a deserving outlier of this mode of thinking?
[2] mostly in regard to CAP spending, which now even Macron is beginning to appreciate the damage it causes
As a future partner (a "brexit" country, which is a completely different beast, since it will be one can assume steered by brexiteers, with a position towards the EU between animosity and hatred), the signals coming from the UK are very worrying. From the top of my head, some things I have been reading lately (mainly in the Telegraph, I do not bother with the Daily Mail or The Sun, which are probably much worse):
- the UK will undercut the EU in taxes
- the UK will leverage its financial prowess to extract concessions from the EU
- intelligence capabilities will be used to further put pressure on the EU
And many, many more.
Regarding the willingness of be held to account: the UK refuses to let the ECJ be the arbitrer of future disputes. What does this mean? Either there must be no arbitrer (so not held to account), or we need a new arbitrer (why more red tape?)
As every country should. I guess it's down to a difference in philosophy - we've long been a nation of shopkeepers, after all. Much like the Dutch. There's little new here, other than a hesitation to subsidise the French. These are ancient games and I'm sure a root of De Gaulle's reticence about the UK's joining. As I said, from my perspective, I see that at worst the UK plays by the rules, but lobbies for those rules to work in its favour, rather than simply ignoring them when it suits.
> Telegraph
aka, 'Torygraph', a right wing broadsheet with questionable interests and a fully-Brexiteering vehicle. I follow it too, but only to see what those at the periphery are thinking. For balance, check The Guardian or [Russian-owned and ever deteriorating] Independent for a completely different perspective of thought from within the UK. I'm sure there are equivalent publications in other European nations.
> the UK will undercut the EU in taxes
As Ireland or - good Lord, Luxembourg do now? As France intends?
> the UK will leverage its financial prowess to extract concessions from the EU
You mean the threat for 'tit for tat' measures against the EU if it continues to threaten The City with hard-line against Euro Clearing? Hardly surprising when the EU is the only principal reserve currency suddenly insisting that its clearing be done 'in-house', apparently with the sole intention of clawing some banking onto the continent.
> intelligence capabilities will be used to further put pressure on the EU
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I hardly see the French and German intelligence agencies as being any less capable or unscrupulous. Here in Blighty we're just more public-facing about capability and intent. Getting back to Galileo for a second, it was the UK's role in Galileo to provide some of the more complex cryptographic aspects of the system - I find it odd how a country can go from trusted partner to polar opposite based on a flawed referendum by its people.
It is tiring to hear continuously what an exceptional country the UK is. We are all exceptional, but we all abide by the same rules. That's kind of the point of having a union.
> The Guardian or [Russian-owned and ever deteriorating] Independent
I read both too. I didn't know The Independent was Russian owned, but little matters. It seems a bit populist, but more balanced than the Telegraph. I find the Telegraph interesting because it is the Government's paper (/s), it seems to reflect the views of a big chunk of the British population, and because it is so extremely one-sided that it seems incredible that this is what nowadays passes by mainstream opinion (and by serious journalism) in the UK. The Guardian seems very balanced (boring?).
> As Ireland or - good Lord, Luxembourg do now? As France intends?
Sure. And if they cross a line, we have EU institutions to correct the situation. That is the point of being under the ECJ. The EU is not a "I blindly trust you" organization: it is a "you'd better stick to the agreements, otherwise you'll get into trouble: look, you signed here". This is how to build a community.
Ireland, for example, has been fined for its tax practices (Apple).
And you are overlooking a very important aspect: one thing is to have Ireland or Luxembourg offering discounted tax rates (which is already a problem, as we can see with all the tech companies being in those countries). But Ireland is nearly a tenth and Luxembourg a twentieth of the UK's size, in GDP terms ([1]). The UK being a tax heaven is a huge problem for the EU.
> Hardly surprising when the EU is the only principal reserve currency suddenly insisting that its clearing be done 'in-house', apparently with the sole intention of clawing some banking onto the continent.
The EU is also the only economic area without clearing being done in its territory, post-Brexit. It is a huge risk. If the only way to balance the situation is going against the interests of a third party, so be it. The EU does not concern itself anymore with the interests of the UK, in so far as those interests are not related to EU's interests.
> I'm not sure what you mean by this
I mean the repeated threats by the UK about withholding intelligence from the EU if other matters (trade deal) are not agreed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
Two weeks ago Theresa May tore it up.
Yes, the UK is an "unreliable partner". In its current regime of rule by imbeciles, there is no point negotiating with it nor coming to agreements with it, because the UK cannot be trusted to actually hold to those agreements from one month to the next.
..the problem is that everything peripheral to that is a mess worthy of a drunken juggler. There's just too much conflicting to make any sense until 'something' is agreed.
My personal suspicions (read: hopes) these last few months are apparently shared by Lord Owen (who does not hope) - namely that the apparent levels of shambolic disorganisation are actually a ploy to create such a mess that as much of the fallout from Brexit can be mitigated.
I'd not be entirely surprised if the thing's drawn out another year or so and then somehow the entire enterprise is swep under the carpet and the UK tucks its tail between its legs and settles back where it should've never left in the first place.
Bear in mind, there's no actual precedence for any of this - I believe if there was any way of getting the UK to stay, somehow, without excess compromise for the EU, 'rules would be broken' because.. well, there aren't any.
I mean, that doesn’t stop India & Pakistan to be dancing on that edge, so I guess there’s that. But really interesting that this possibility is even on anyone’s mind though.
Still, having the 6th economy of the world as a tax heaven in the shores of the EU is not very reassuring.
https://www.canada.ca/en/space-agency/news/2016/12/canadian-...
https://www.esa.int/Education/ESA_Member_and_Associated_Stat...
[1] that term seems slightly off at this time in the morning, in my sleepy state...
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.
It’s one of the reasons I left.
I don’t think British society is ready to address these issues either, there’s still a lot of unacknowledged classism and racism.
Overall, I’d sum up the British attitude as “it’s not that great here, but it’s the best country in the world”.
That is, there’s a lot of cynicism, but people assume the balance in the UK is as good as it gets.
It really isn’t.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthill_report
(I'm biased. Sue me)
It just infuriates me how much U.K. engineers could accomplish if we weren’t fighting with our own government bureaucracies the whole time and could concentrate on the work
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.
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.
It's documented in the book Vertical Empire, I don't know of an online copy, I'm afraid.
https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Vertical-Empire-History-Programme... <-- not an affiliate link, just a reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow#Cancellation <-- brief mention here
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).
https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/walk-roun... has quite a few good pictures. Deep image https://alondoninheritance.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Fe...
This was on the Southbank, near where the London Eye currently is.
> 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.
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/Canada_and_weapons_of_mass_des...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#Canadian_sit...
"Ministry Of Space", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Space
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.
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.
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.
In 1961 Gagarin‘s flight was followed by Alan Shepard also in 1961 and they each required much larger payloads. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_(spacecraft)#Vostok_3...
~100kg is a comparable payload to the Falcon 1 (particularly given it launched from a less equatorial site). It makes perfect sense for an organisation's first orbital rocket, and is more than enough to launch useful satellites.
"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."