How Britain Won the Space Race: The Story of Bernard Lovell and Jodrell Bank Timeshift

On a bleak day in December 1945,

one determined man towed a trailer of ex-Army equipment

into a muddy field in Cheshire.

The place was called Jodrell Bank

and it would be here, experimenting with surplus radar kit,

that he would accidentally find

distant radio waves coming from space.

They were basically mapping out

something you couldn't see with your eyes.

This Heath Robinson figure built contraptions of increasing complexity

in order to listen to the heavens at the dawn of the space age.

Of course, everybody was wondering what on earth is it going to be?

Yet, in 12 years time, he would be standing in the same field

in the shadow of the world's largest radio telescope.

This strange vegetable was starting to sprout out of the Cheshire plain.

This was the only instrument in the Western world capable of tracking

both Soviet and American rockets at the height of the Cold War.

Three, two, one, zero.

Here's Jodrell Bank working for both the Americans and the Russians,

tracking their material, and both sides knowing it's happening.

I think it might have been

just about the only thing that was remotely like that.

But the pioneering work of Bernard Lovell

wouldn't be defined by the Cold War.

His telescope at Jodrell Bank would be at the forefront

of a scientific revolution.

He was a real scientist.

If there was some scientific mystery which he could tackle,

he was going to do it.

The solution to one such mystery

would redraw the known map of the universe

and lie behind the most mind-bending discovery of the 20th century.

That everything began in a big bang.

So who was Bernard Lovell?

And how did he put Britain at the forefront of the space race

and the search for a new understanding

of our place in the universe?

It's a weekend in September 1959

and Bernard Lovell is playing cricket.

For Lovell, every Saturday was reserved for the game.

He was captain of the local First XI, so missing a match wasn't an option.

But this wasn't an average day

because the Russians had launched a rocket to the moon

and only Lovell's telescope could verify its landing.

TRANSLATION FROM RUSSIAN:

If the Russians' calculations were correct, their rocket would be

the first man-made object to hit another celestial body.

At the time, both the United States and the Soviet Union were obsessed

with getting a rocket to the moon.

It was hard for the Americans to admit

that the Russian space programme was more advanced than their own.

This led to rumours that the Soviets were somehow faking it.

But neither side had any instrument capable of tracking their own rocket.

So Lovell's new radio telescope,

in the heart of the Cheshire countryside,

was forced to play independent adjudicator

at the very beginning of the space race.

It was only after the cricket had a break for tea

that Lovell engaged with this unfolding drama.

Calling Jodrell Bank from a telephone box near the ground,

he learned that he and his telescope were being summoned

by both sides to confirm the events taking place.

After finishing the match, he returned to the telescope,

still in his whites, to a telex from Moscow

giving the precise frequencies and time

of the lunar impact for the Russian probe.

He was at Jodrell in the evening

by which time the Russians had sent all the data necessary for him

to track this rocket as it approached the moon.

But in-between, he was going to play cricket, and that was the balance.

By Sunday, the world's press assembled at Jodrell Bank

to listen, as the signals from the probe ceased,

indicating that the Russians had hit the moon.

HISSING AND BEEPS

What we just heard were the signals from Lunik 2,

recorded...picked up by the Lovell telescope here,

recorded on 13 September 1959,

and played back as a sound.

The beeps effectively are the signal coming from the spacecraft.

And when they stop,

we'd actually tracked the spacecraft right down onto the moon.

So it was possible to show

that the Russians had sent the spacecraft to the moon.

It was the first ever spacecraft to hit the moon,

to actually reach the surface of another celestial body.

How did this unlikely figure come to find himself

at the epicentre of a new age?

The son of a lay preacher and a shopkeeper,

Bernard Lovell had not considered the prospect of a life in science

until, as an impressionable schoolboy,

he was taken to a lecture by the eminent physicist AM Tyndall.

When he was a young boy,

in a village school, and in his own words,

I remember them very clearly, he said, "I was not a good student."

In other words, precocious intelligence not being stretched.

And he was taken to Bristol, and he walked into a lecture theatre

and he described to me the two globes

and the electric spark that was made to jump between them.

# I put a spell on you

# Cos you're mine... #

And he talked in really vivid terms

about the colour of the sparks in the room

and the sound of the arc lamps

and the smell of the electrical discharge

and the scorching of the air across the room.

I found him quite enchanting and bewildered,

and from that time I had a really great ambition to go to university.

MUSIC: Moonlight Serenade by The Glenn Miller Orchestra

But in 1939, this idealistic young scientist,

like many others of his generation,

was wrenched from his fledgling research position

in the Physics department and thrown into wartime work.

The aspect of Father's work that is generally regarded

as critical to the Allied war effort was

the development by his team of the short-wavelength radar

that enabled the war against the U-boats in the Atlantic

to be carried on successfully at night.

Lovell's new short-wavelength radar allowed Allied night bombers

to bounce radio waves off U-boats as they surfaced to refuel at night.

This revealed their positions and left them vulnerable to attack.

Britain was being starved to death

by the success of the U-boat attacks on the convoys

and Father's team was instrumental

in turning the tide of the battle in the Atlantic.

During the war, Lovell was in charge of a team of scientists

who developed an entirely new technology

at a speed that would have made Steve Jobs' head spin.

He made things work

which nobody would have dreamed of before the war.

So that he learnt a lot of radio engineering,

but he also learnt about how to run a big project.

The wartime work made Lovell understand pressure

and how to get things done with limited time and resources.

So, at the end of the war, with great relief, he was able to return

with new drive to his great passion for pure science.

Lovell had become intrigued by the possibility

that radar might be used to do more than find Nazi U-boats.

So, when he returned to Manchester in 1945,

he came with an Army trailer full of now defunct radar equipment.

All he needed was a quiet patch of land

far away from the noise of the city to set up his radar and start work.

Father went to Jodrell for the first time to see if it would

be suitable and had his Army trailer delivered there in December '45.

And the events I'm describing must have been very, very early in 1946.

There was nobody there, just my father,

nobody else was on the staff at Jodrell.

Jodrell Bank was a few acres of field

belonging to the university's Botany department

in the heart of Cheshire's countryside.

One of Lovell's early research projects was the study of meteors.

He wanted to prove that what you could see in the night sky

with your eyes was echoed by what he could see on his radar.

# Mr Sandman... #

In this early work at Jodrell Bank,

Lovell was joined by keen amateur astronomer Manning Prentice,

who, on clear winter nights, would lie in a deck chair studying

the night sky with his binoculars, shouting his observations to Lovell.

I was allowed, as an early treat - I must only have been about six -

to go, to be wrapped up with every sweater I had,

and be allowed to go and sit in another deckchair

next to Mr Prentice

and be there during the night,

far, far, far beyond bedtime,

while Manning Prentice would bellow out

the coordinates of his observations.

And inside the trailer, simultaneously, there would be

the team picking up the reflections from these meteor trails.

Lovell's enthusiasm doubled

when this research unequivocally linked radio echoes with meteors,

proving that astronomy could be done by using radar.

This pioneering research quickly drew eager young graduate students

to the fields of Jodrell Bank

to build their own radio-detection devices.

And the place started to look like some kind of strange fairground.

Post-war period, there was lots of ex-Army equipment

that was being dumped into mineshafts.

So they actually drove around the country with a truck,

piling as much of the electronics in the back as they could.

It was very much a sort of Heath Robinson

sort of seat-of-the-pants affair, where people would

build their own kit out of whatever they had to hand.

# Mr Sandman, someone to hold... #

We children were involved in this.

"Here's a piece of wire, this is a parabola.

"You're going to put a wire in the centre of it and help us

"listen to radio waves from space."

Which, looking back, was a slightly odd thing for a five-year-old

to be told, but it was interesting, sure it was interesting.

It was a lot more fun than going to the park.

There was a very good camaraderie

amongst quite a small group of people.

And they just made things work.

It was a very great privilege, really, to be involved in that.

Lovell and his team quickly realised that the success they were having

from their tangle of wires and aerials would be greatly enhanced

if they could connect their wires together

and stretch them across the field to create a larger collecting area,

able to pick up weaker signals from more distant stars.

But this early radio telescope couldn't move,

it just picked up radio waves from the stars as the sky moved overhead.

So he built a very large radio telescope,

as we now call it, by stretching wires in the form of a dish

and holding them up with scaffold poles.

It was quite a job to build it,

which they did, with their own hands.

The diameter of the bowl was determined by the distance

between the hedge of the farmer's field

and the truck, the Army truck,

that they had their equipment in, that had been dragged into the field

some years before and had just sunk up to its axles in the mud.

So that determined the size of the telescope,

that's why it's 218 foot.

So this was all very, you know, seat-of-the-pants stuff,

really great pioneering work.

My only personal memory of it

is being driven past it by my father

and seeing what seemed to be a tangled mess of chicken wire

with some kind of latticework girder poking into the sky.

And my father said,

"That's some rum kind of thing for looking at things."

In 1950, using this contraption, two of Lovell's colleagues,

Hanbury Brown and Cyril Hazard, made the first detection of radio waves

from the nearby Andromeda galaxy.

This was a revolutionary discovery, revealing that other galaxies,

besides our own Milky Way, emitted radio waves.

This new astronomy effectively remapped the universe.

I mean, for thousands of years, people will have looked at the skies

just using their eyes, so looked at the stars overhead,

the moon, the planets, and they even built structures, you know,

Stonehenge and others, associated with what happens in the sky.

400 years ago or so, Galileo was one of the first to use a telescope.

So a telescope basically just enhances the view

that your eye gives you. It collects more light, it zooms in on things.

But all that involved visible light, the stuff your eye can see.

Radio astronomy worked differently,

opening up a view of the invisible universe.

They were basically mapping out

something you couldn't see with your eyes.

So they were starting to pick up bright sources of radio waves

and then having to go and compare them to what we already knew.

And quite often, there was nothing there in the existing map.

And that was one of the great stories

of those early years of radio astronomy,

pinning down what these new radio sources were in the sky.

Lovell's contemporary, the celebrated cosmologist Fred Hoyle,

was particularly excited about the science of radio astronomy

and the possibilities it was opening up.

Its scope and reach was mind-boggling.

What radio astronomy has done is to give us

an extra window through which to look out at the universe.

This new view might allow astronomers

to look right back to the beginning of time.

But Hoyle himself didn't believe the universe had a beginning.

He was a leading advocate for steady-state theory,

the idea that the universe was in a process of continuous creation.

Today, we can peer far into the depths of space and see

some of the many millions of island universes we call galaxies.

Were they all created in a moment of time?

The fragments of a tremendous explosion?

Or is creation continuous

in a universe that had no beginning and will have no end?

Steady-state theory were pushing those who believed in the big bang

to find evidence to back up their claim.

The debate spanned the era, and while an answer would eventually come,

these were the very biggest questions.

Once you're in this, once you understand what the questions are,

and start thinking in those terms, you can't ever stop.

Bernard Lovell was fuelled by the exciting debates

arising in astronomy and was becoming increasingly obsessed

by the possibilities the research at Jodrell bank was throwing up.

Their DIY telescope had proved its worth,

but what Lovell really wanted was a telescope of epic proportions,

one that could move to look at any part of the sky.

He believed that if he could achieve this dream,

it would change human understanding of the universe.

They were just so determined that

if they could build a steerable thing like this,

it would be bound to be picking up some interesting things,

but they couldn't say what they were going to be.

They were right, of course.

In 1950, Lovell met Sheffield-based engineer Charles Husband.

Husband jumped at the opportunity to build something new,

and construction tenders went out in June of that year.

When Husband came to Jodrell to talk to Lovell, he said,

"Well, that's really only rather like a bridge

"with a moving piece on top.

"So let's just see if we can't design it."

And you have to realise that in those days

there was no computer at all, no question of computer-aided design,

it was all done with a slide rule and pen and pencil.

It was a marriage of ambitious engineering

with cutting-edge science.

They were sort of two like minds in a way - Lovell was driven by

the pure research, Husband was a sort of, you know,

go-for-it sort of engineer

who really felt that he could build such a thing.

Nobody had ever tried to build a device of this size

that would operate with the precision of a watch.

Nobody had done that before.

They'd done it with small things,

but they'd never done it with anything like that size.

It was a huge engineering leap.

There weren't prototypes,

there was just the first fully steerable large radio telescope.

A strange structure began to grow out of the Cheshire fields,

bemusing the local community.

If we stood there we could see across the trees

and could see it coming higher and higher gradually. And...

..of course everybody was wondering what an earth it's going to be?

There's strange vegetables starting to sprout out of the Cheshire plain.

In order to get his new telescope built,

Lovell needed support, and lots of it.

People had to be persuaded that it's a good idea.

The university had to be persuaded,

the people who funded the university had to be persuaded,

the government department that funded scientific projects

had to be persuaded,

so all those had to be

essentially lobbied to, very skilfully,

in order to persuade them to part

with what was an almost unprecedented amount of money

for an astronomical project in Britain.

We shall require a radio telescope

with a diameter of at least 250 feet.

That is the smallest and cheapest instrument

which will serve our purpose.

APPLAUSE

Lovell was harnessing an enthusiasm for radio astronomy

that had been fostered at the Festival of Britain.

On top of the old shop tower there's the latest radar equipment.

This national exhibition organised by the government gave

the public a feeling of recovery after the war by showcasing

the very best of British science and technology

and Jodrell Bank made an important contribution.

The fact that the centrepiece of the Festival of Britain is

the Dome of Discovery,

which is an exhibition that centres on the national contribution

that science and engineering makes, as part of a national story,

the fact that nine million people attended that exhibition...

In fact, at that exhibition

they saw radio telescopes being part of that story.

Well, that means radio astronomy is already part of that public image

of science in post-war Britain.

Participating in the Festival of Britain was a savvy move.

It excited the visiting public with the new science of radio astronomy

and was something the promoters of British science

could really get behind.

It's a good example of how Lovell can be extremely canny

in presenting different audiences with different arguments

for why Britain needs a giant steerable radio telescope.

Throughout the 1950s,

the construction of the telescope progressed steadily,

but costs were escalating.

The telescope began to go over budget which began to have

quite an impact on domestic affairs in the family home.

The original cost estimate they put together at the end of the 1940s,

early 1950s, was £120,000, and in the end it cost about £750,000.

Sir Bernard had a great deal of trouble to get the thing up

and it's a well-known fact that he reached a stage of being on

the point of criminal bankruptcy, personal trouble for him.

This was public money that Lovell was spending.

His project began to cut scorn as

Parliament's Public Accounts Committee

mounted a formal enquiry into the telescope.

The Public Accounts Committee could criticise

the spending of government departments in such a way that

whatever they said,

their criticism had to be listened to very carefully.

To be censored by the Public Accounts Committee

was an immense shame for a government department.

The government tried to counter the bad press

by commissioning a documentary film about the project.

It was to be a propaganda piece for the telescope showing both

the British public and the wider world what an engineering achievement

this was and how important this new astronomy would be in the future.

The script was a carefully worded offence

against Parliamentary criticism,

shot in a very terse style, topped off with some wooden acting.

Well, yes, of course that's what I really want.

A fully steerable telescope with a bowl about 250 in diameter.

But everyone says the engineering isn't too great.

Why, I don't know. The problem isn't entirely new.

Large swing vehicles and big dock side cranes

have many of the same features.

In the film what you see is very carefully stage managed dialogue

between the scientists and the engineers.

But it wasn't a British government film

that would save Lovell and his telescope.

The miracle would come in the form of a small satellite

launched into orbit by a Soviet rocket in October 1957.

It must have been a school day morning,

I think it was a Friday in October,

and there was a tremendous kerfuffle

in the early hours, and bells ringing.

There was a telephone in the hall at home which just about woke you up.

PHONE RINGS

Charles Husband had telephoned and said,

"Why don't you get Jodrell involved in this Sputnik?

"It will help us with our financial troubles."

We were saying, "Yeah, why don't you tune into Sputnik?"

And he said, "Because it's easy, anybody can do it."

Lovell wasn't interested in trying to pick up

the signals from Sputnik itself.

This sort of beach ball sized satellite that goes ping

because you could pick up the signals from that

with any sort of small radio receiver,

you didn't need a giant radio telescope like this to do it.

However, the media, the British public all thought that

somehow Jodrell Bank must be associated with this project

and they were asking, "What are you doing for Sputnik?"

And it actually wasn't until he got a call from someone in government

who pointed out that actually it would be quite interesting if Lovell

could demonstrate that we could get a radar echo off,

not off the Sputnik satellite itself,

but the rocket that had carried Sputnik into space,

which was itself also orbiting the earth.

And the reason was because that rocket was an

intercontinental ballistic missile.

And of course the next thing, it might launch into space,

might be something rather more threatening

than this sort of beach ball sized thing that goes ping.

Sputnik shocked the Americans.

They were confident they had bigger

and better missiles than the Russians.

But here they were in second place with a big question to answer.

A couple of months later they tried to do the same thing

and it blew up on the pad.

It raised I think about four inches, that's as far as it flew.

News about Sputnik sent scientists rushing to Jodrell Bank as they knew

it was the only place

that had a hope of detecting Sputnik's carrier rocket.

Everybody came back into work.

I mean, the whole thing between the 4th of October,

the following week, everybody was back in.

They did a few months' work in a matter of a few days.

Jodrell Bank's radar equipment was being monitored around the clock.

Lovell and his colleagues were looking for the unmistakable trace

the Sputnik rocket would produce on their screens.

This was all very exciting for one schoolboy.

By the next Saturday night they tracked it, and I was there.

He says quite correctly in his memoire of this that

"I pleaded with him to be present."

I felt I earned it cos I'd been cycling up and down

with sandwiches and tea from home for all the press

who by now were everywhere at Jodrell.

Jodrell had no experience of this.

There's this place that is in the middle of fields

in the middle of Cheshire

and suddenly there's Raymond Baxter on the roof

talking into a microphone saying this is history being made.

Everything's going on and I was allowed to go in this hut

and I saw this echo on the cathode ray tub.

I can see it now. Incredible.

A photograph's taken of that cathode ray tube and developed

and then magnified and projected in front of the assembled media

and Lovell was basically pointing out the trace,

the black line that was the flash of the radar echo,

the pulse beam coming back from the rocket as it orbited the earth.

Father reports correctly that he did say to me

"If the sight of that doesn't make you a scientist, nothing will."

In the early years of the space race,

Jodrell Bank was the only place in the world with radar

capable of tracking the first rocket, both Russians and Americans,

who were launching into space.

So it was relied on by both superpowers,

but Lovell's telescope wasn't designed for tracking

and some of the astronomers on his staff were dubious about giving

the telescope up for this purpose.

If you read the original design study

for the Lovell Telescope, as it was,

tracking these space missions was not part of the remit.

We were suppose to be looking at the planets

and things much farther out in space,

and of course that work did continue,

but suddenly this new arena opened up,

and not only the sort of peaceful use of space,

but also this great tension between these two superpowers

and I think Jodrell forged that path between the two.

I mean, this instrument was so far ahead of its time,

as an engineering achievement it was astonishing.

And as a scientific instrument it was uniquely capable of performing

some of these tasks for both the Russians and the Americans.

On the one hand, Lovell allowed the US Air Force to base themselves

at Jodrell Bank to use the telescope for tracking.

And on the other,

he invited Russian scientists to search for their space probes.

Given the political climate working,

with both sides at the time was totally unorthodox.

Three, two, one. Zero.

Here's Jodrell Bank working for both the Americans and the Russians

tracking their material, and both sides knowing it's happening.

I think it might have been just about the only thing

that was remotely like that.

Space tracking was a big coup for Lovell.

His collaboration with the Americans in particular

did much to restore his standing.

Princess Margaret visited Jodrell Bank to send signals to

the most successful American satellite, Pioneer 5,

as it sped out into space.

This rubber stamp of approval on behalf of the British establishment

did a lot to ease the pressure on Lovell.

One wealthy benefactor, Lord Nuffield, a pro-business, staunch

anti-Communist, was particularly impressed with Lovell's work.

These various activities, although they were, as I've said,

a small proportion of the work of the telescope,

were very important

and one result was that the funding of the telescope which had

actually still lagged behind, was completely cleared by Lord Nuffield

who telephoned Bernard Lovell one day and said,

"How much more money do you need?"

And said, "Don't worry, we'll pay that."

My impression is that Lovell's achievement was fantastic

given the situation of the country,

given the fact it was nearly bankrupt, given the fact that

nobody was interested in doing kind of things like this.

We were very inward looking, very negative.

It was a dirty, dark place in those days.

And I think for him to have collected some of the money together

and gone at it so hard to do it and get to within, what was it, 50,000,

that the phone called paid?

"I'll pay for that." Bingo.

I mean, it was a brilliant...

It said a lot I thought for the steely purpose behind that

charming and obeying exterior.

By involving himself in the space race,

Lovell tactically saved the telescope from ruin.

But in 1962, as the Cold War intensified,

a confrontation between the United States

and Russia over Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba escalated.

A dramatic standoff between the two superpowers

brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Lovell's telescope was the only radar system in the UK

capable of detecting incoming missiles,

so it became the first line of defence.

This sent Lovell into a torment of anxiety.

And at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis there was a team of

trained military personal trained to use the telescope

who were on standby to walk in here into the control room

to take over at the control desk here

and to drive the telescope round to point east

and to send out the radar pulses

looking for the echoes from the missiles rising.

And although we could have done nothing about it,

we couldn't have prevented those missiles from hitting,

it would have provided that several minutes for some people at least

to get into the bunkers.

PHONE RINGS

A new phone with a green handset appeared on Father's desk in his

study at home and that phone was not for use for any outgoing calls,

and certainly not for use by any of us.

That was the hotline, that was the phone on which Father

was going to be told to make ready for the telescope to be used by

the state as part of the western defence

because a missile strike was considered likely.

Once again in his career

Lovell found himself engulfed by the threat of war.

His scientific work threatened by political forces

quite beyond his control.

The Russians then invited him on a state visit

only a matter of months after the drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Because Jodrell had this important role in defence,

Lovell asked whether it was appropriate for him

to be actually going to the Soviet Union so soon after that.

And actually nobody seemed to be worried, it was OK,

it was fine for him to go.

He went along and the surprising thing was that they actually,

he was surprised by this, they took him to see

what was the top secret facilities down on the coast of the Black Sea.

So he was shown around this whole place.

And then I think maybe even gently persuaded

might he consider the possibility of staying.

They could offer him some money

to build his own large telescopes there in Russia.

He didn't want to stay in Russia of course.

He said he was an Englishman, he wanted to return to England.

Upon his return, Lovell fell ill.

Suffering fatigue, headaches, depression and despondency.

The authorities blamed his mysterious illness on radiation exposure, that

the Soviets had tried to poison him in an attempt to remove his memories.

I don't think there was anything in that story,

but it was an important thing for him.

I mean, later in life Father rather warmed to the idea

the KGB had nobbled him, but I don't quite believe that.

What I do remember is that after years and years of tremendous strain

in dealing with the telescope and of...

going through the Cuban Missile Crisis with the telescope

as an instrument of defence for the west,

an exhausting trip to Russia, I think Father was just wiped out.

Rather than a Soviet poisoning conspiracy it seems more likely that

conflicting moral pressures caused Lovell's breakdown.

And despite a knighthood

he considered abandoning his work at Jodrell Bank entirely.

He had devoted enormous energies,

long periods of time wading against the currents of ignorance

to get his dream, his vision made real and concrete

and operational.

And he was a pure scientist and when it became

the interest of the military and the politicians he was deeply depressed.

Really shaken to his foundations of belief.

And he has spoken about this and he said that at one point

he considered resigning and entering the priesthood.

Father announced at one meal time that he was thinking of joining

the priesthood, so this,

I don't know how many of us children where there,

but let's say there was quite a number of us, and...

this was pretty funny.

I mean, let's be clear,

the atmosphere in the family home was not reverential to anybody.

Everybody just had to fight their corner, including my father.

And so there were gales of laughter at this.

We thought this was really funny.

And I can't remember the detail, but I'm sure one of us attempted

the imitation of a sermon given by Bernard Lovell

explaining how God might well not exist.

The priesthood clearly wasn't for Lovell,

but his Methodist upbringing never left him and when the BBC invited him

to deliver the Reith Lectures, it was to his spirituality that he turned.

I am certainly not competent to discuss this problem of knowledge

outside that required by my scientific tools

and my outlook is essentially a simple one.

Simple in the sense that I am no more surprised or distressed at

the limitation of science when faced with this great problem of creation

than I am at the limitation of the spectroscope in describing

the radiance of a sunset.

Or at the theory of counterpoint in describing the beauty of a fugue.

He really had a real sense of beauty

and when he talked about the universe, you know,

people think that scientists just see everything in numbers, but

scientists see everything in numbers and the numbers are beautiful.

The Reith Lectures really gave him a sense of the legitimacy of

the work here and what he was doing

and how important it was and how valued it was in society.

And certainly I think positioned him as a thinker as well as a scientist.

I think it was an emergence of a new kind of public figure.

While Lovell was now a public intellectual,

the Jodrell Bank story had also found its way into popular culture

via a BBC drama starring a new acting talent Julie Christie.

A for Andromeda was a BBC series

that was aired in 1961

which just happens to be a story that is eerily similar

to the Jodrell Bank story.

It was set a large radio telescope in Yorkshire

managed by a charming and affable professor.

Sound familiar?

-And what's that one, Harvey?

-Number 102, professor.

At this new telescope, just as it's opening,

something dramatic happens, just like Jodrell Bank.

It's not Sputnik this case,

but it's the picking up of a mysterious signal.

The signal is found to be coming from the Andromeda galaxy.

So this is a direct lift from the Jodrell Bank story.

Perhaps if it wasn't for that fluke we should never have heard it.

PHONE RINGS

It was written by Fred Hoyle, who was, alongside Lovell,

the most visible, famous astronomer in the country.

Throughout the 1960s,

Lovell and his telescope continued to generate stories,

somehow always finding their way

to the centre of dramatic space age moments.

Those weird sounds came from a spacecraft called Luna 9,

again recorded here at Jodrell Bank here in 1966.

Lunar 9 was an unmanned spacecraft.

It landed on the surface of the moon.

It took a photograph of the surface of the moon, developed it,

scanned it and transmitted that photograph back to earth

in the form of a radio signal.

Lovell used the telescope to hack into the signal

and, deploying an early kind of fax machine,

printed off the first pictures from the surface of the moon.

These were soon all over the news.

Nothing like this had ever been seen before.

After Lunar 9,

Bernard Lovell was soon thrust back into the spotlight

when James Burke, the BBC's main reporter on the space race,

asked him to contribute to his coverage of the audacious quest

to put men on the moon.

We asked Lovell on the show because he was a fantastic performer.

The audiences absolutely loved him.

Charming, obeying, affable, articulate,

spoke with great clarity

about what he was talking about.

He was also of course the President of the Royal Astronomical Society,

so a big wheel, and he gave the programme kudos,

it gave him authority.

If somebody like that would come on our show

it would make it look better than it was, and it did, and he did.

Apollo 8 launched in 1968 was the first manned spacecraft

to leave earth's orbit

and fly around the moon recording the now iconic earthrise footage.

It's hard to believe now because we're so blase about it,

but to look up in the sky and think that there were people on

the other side of the moon was just unbelievable.

I mean, people went out in the street to stare up

and you couldn't believe it was happening.

But Lovell saw getting to the moon as a circus event

and had mixed feelings about it.

He was one of the first to question the value of the American missions.

When Bernard was on the studio, inevitably

the subject of the scientific purpose of the missions came up.

And he was understandably ambivalent about it,

as indeed many scientists were at the time.

And so what then does this particular exercise

add to our knowledge

in terms of observing the moon surface, Sir Bernard?

I don't honestly think that you must search too much for any new vivid

scientific facts which are going to arise from these photographs.

It's not really the point at all.

We must treat it as a human adventure

and superb engineering achievement.

And I think later in life he said he became even more ambivalent

about the question of whether or not you should send men anywhere.

He did on Apollo 8 and later say that these were great technological

triumphs, which of course they were if you think about it.

Computing for example, the amount of computer power they had you know,

I've got more on my cellphone today, but they got to the moon and back.

If you like, the space race helped us to get the telescope working

and financed a lot of good scientific work,

but in itself the space race, the race to launch rockets

and get them going and put people in rockets,

that was not really our business at all.

As the space programmes went on tracking equipment was developed

all over the world and the reliance of Lovell's telescope declined.

So Jodrell Bank was able to dedicate itself entirely to science.

The kind of discoveries that Bernard was making with his own telescope

were immensely more important than Apollo, immensely more important.

I mean, Apollo, let's face it, was, "We're better than you."

It was a political statement, really. 99% of it was that.

If the space race was mainly metal bashing

and Buck Rodgers, then the really big scientific question of the age wasn't

can man walk on the moon but how did the universe begin?

Radio astronomy was at the very centre of this debate,

and Lovell one of those leading it.

Sir Bernard, it seems to me that the scientist's choice between

the Big Bang theory and the theory of continuous creation

is really entirely an arbitrary one

until somebody does some experiments or makes some

observations to prove it one way or the other.

Now, is this telescope going to help?

Certainly. We think that it is penetrating so far back in time

and out in space that it is giving us information about these

regions which probably hold the key to this great problem.

It was the radio astronomers who were the only ones

capable of looking far enough back into time

and space to picture the very beginning of the universe.

They dealt the final death blow to the steady-state hypothesis

by discovering the radiation left over from the big bang.

But rather than settling debates, this probing into the outer

reaches of the universe, would yield even more fantastic discoveries.

And Jodrell Bank would have a hand in the next big breakthrough.

One gifted student was inspired by a formative summer at Jodrell,

being introduced to the cutting edge of experimental radio astronomy.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell went on to do pioneering research

at Cambridge University,

from where she would make one of the most important astronomical

discoveries of the 20th century.

I began to notice there was something slightly

curious on the records, they came out as paper charts,

and, of course, on these charts you could see radio sources.

But there was also something that wouldn't quite fit either bill.

It wasn't exactly a twinkling radio source,

and it wasn't exactly interference either.

It finally turned out to be this signal that goes blip, blip, blip.

Typically, when you look at radio waves coming from outer space,

if you were to play those signals through a speaker, you would

hear a hiss, a white noise.

There would be no pattern detectable in there.

Now, we have this regular pulsing pattern.

In a sense, that would be exactly the sort of thing you might

expect if someone was sending a deliberate signal.

The natural assumption is it is artificial, it is Earth man made.

Only, it wasn't Earth man made

because it moved round the sky with the stars. So, is it ET?

Is it little green men out there?

But when Jocelyn found similar signals across the sky,

it was soon realised that they were in fact exotic astronomical objects.

About the same time I found the second, the third and the fourth.

Then it gets really incredible

that these things are little green men.

It has to be something much more natural.

It was soon realised, that these

things were not extraterrestrials, but actually,

perhaps something just as exciting for a physicist,

they were things that we now call pulsars.

They are actually the remnants of exploded stars.

So when stars more than about eight times the mass of the sun,

reached the end of their lives, they run out of nuclear fuel,

and they collapse in on themselves.

We see them because they beam out radiation from their magnetic

poles and as the star spins, it behaves exactly like a lighthouse.

This beam sweeps around and you see a flash, flash, flash.

These distant beacons from the very depths of the universe,

turned out to be ideal for Lovell's telescope to study

because it could point to any part of the sky.

Astronomers could test physics to its extremes using these objects

and Jodrell Bank has been studying them for over 40 years.

I think it is a lovely story

that Jocelyn did, in fact, come to Jodrell Bank first,

then went to Cambridge and made this magnificent discovery.

Now, back in Jodrell, Jodrell is, in fact, one of the world centres,

I should daresay the world centre, for pulsar research.

So pulsars weren't a message from ET,

but the idea of alien life was somehow in the ether.

Both Bernard Lovell and Fred Hoyle,

were prepared to entertain the notion with a good deal of enthusiasm.

Now, it seems unlikely that the Earth is unique,

and our own planetary system is unique.

In fact, the modern ideas about the formation of planetary systems,

makes it seem quite certain that planetary systems,

of which the one around the sun is an example, must be

of extremely frequent occurrence in the universe.

Nature doesn't do things in ones and twos, she's not mean.

There are millions of planets, millions of stars

and millions of galaxies,

and very likely up there,

millions of other different kinds of intelligent creatures.

What was once the sole concern of B-movies,

was now being seen as a legitimate scientific query,

backed up by the nation's leading astrophysicists.

Stanley's interest really was -

is there life elsewhere in the universe?

So the only possibility we could find out whether

there was extraterrestrial life was,

of course, through radio astronomy.

Could we pick up signals from other civilisations?

Radio astronomy, of course, was the way to do it.

At the end of the 1960s, Stanley Kubrick would make a visionary film

about the question of life in the universe.

He wanted it to be a serious work that engaged fully with hard science.

But in order to do so,

he would have to talk to a number of leading figures.

First on the list, was Sir Bernard Lovell,

Britain's leading astrophysicist.

He chose Sir Bernard Lovell because the nearest thing

we have had ever had in this country to a celebrity star astronomer.

He was very visible at the time, and in a sense he was quite

a natural person for Kubrick to come and speak to about 2001.

I also think Lovell was very aware that it is by connecting people

to stories and narrative

and imagination that they then become connected to the science.

I think there is a great similarity between Stanley's work

and Sir Bernard Lovell.

I think it can be summed up in one word - determination.

Lovell made an impossible dream into a reality,

turning a muddy field into an installation capable of giving

Britain a key role in the space age.

I think he did a tremendous amount in simply getting that

telescope onto the public consciousness, which he did,

partly because of his hard work and partly because of his charm.

Every time he went on television, he was a winner. He had audiences.

From a speculative beginning,

the Lovell telescope is now an icon of British science.

This telescope is still doing cutting edge scientific research.

Actually, Jodrell Bank is now the home of the next great

radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array, which will see

the future of radio astronomy for at least the next 50 years.

The theme here isn't conflict, isn't defence, isn't spies,

isn't what turns out to be ephemeral stuff,

it's science.

It is people seeking knowledge.

The telescope is obviously an impressive scientific instrument,

but what Lovell built far exceeds its initial purpose,

and has inspired more than a small group of astrophysicists.

From science-fiction creators, to small children who wanted to

build it out of Meccano,

the telescope is more than the sum of its parts.

You walk on to that site and look at it and you just think, wow,

it is overwhelming.

It's a beautifully sculptured form, it certainly knocked me for six.

I was lost for words.

I think people have a really strong response to it because it is so big.

I think it is a visceral human thing.

I'm from the north-east of England

and the Angel of the North has had a similar impact on people.

There is a sense of ownership and place, really.

People regard it as something that signals home

or signals their own sense of belonging and heritage.

I think that's connected to the fact that they also know it is

picking up signals from way out in space, which is

a really fascinating thing for everybody.

Lovell, the son of Methodists,

who listened to the heavens the better to understand

the signs of the universe, is a very modern kind of hero,

who leaves behind a very special legacy.

Sir Bernard Lovell died in August 2012,

but the telescope which bears his name, has fused itself

into both the Cheshire landscape and the popular imagination.

People say, "And where are you from?"

We said, "You wouldn't know, it's way in the heart of Cheshire,

"right near the telescope."

You'd only to mention Jodrell Bank telescope.

"Oh yes, I've been there."

We are being put on the map because of the telescope.

It's fitted in, it's fitted in beautifully.

When you're looking at it

going along the road from Twemlow towards Chelford,

it's just a magnificent sight, really.

Especially in the sunset,

when the sun is going down and the light is shining on it.

It is a wonderful sight.