British Space Race Timeshift

EXPLOSION

The space race -

a two-horse race, you might think, between the US and the Soviet Union.

But for a short time,

there was an unlikely third player in the world of rocket research.

Britain was the top scientific group in the world.

I think we were unsurpassed as regards innovative thinking, frankly.

So what happened to the UK's rocket programme?

The answer is one familiar from other failed post-war British industries - lack of investment.

We were in a very strong position,

which we threw away as the years went on.

Britain had lots of big brains -

people who foresaw the future with rockets

and space travel, but this was not pursued by the British Government.

This is the story of the unsung pioneers of British space exploration,

the rocket engineers, scientists, and, ultimately, the dreamers who,

despite lack of resources,

never gave up on bringing the future into the present.

The passion of a bunch of engineers made something happen

which didn't have time to be useful, and so was only delightful.

The story of the British space race begins before the Second World War

with the emergence of obscure rocket clubs dotted all over Europe.

The British called theirs the BIS - the British Interplanetary Society.

Leading member Arthur C Clarke and his contemporaries

dreamed of a space age in which Britain would be a forerunner.

They really do assume

that Britain would be involved. It seems natural to them

that the same military/industrial complex which built radar and the spitfire,

will eventually be sending some squadron leader into orbit

with his wind-combed moustache in his helmet.

Arthur C Clarke says,

"We were people who couldn't afford a car, but together could just afford the rear-view mirror."

That's the level on which they could work.

Rocket clubs, whether in the UK, Germany, or the Soviet Union,

pushed forward the idea of developing rocket technology.

In Germany, they were an ideal recruiting ground for Die Wehrmacht,

developing what would later become the V1, V2 weapons.

What mattered most to every country in the world, at this time, was not space, but weaponry.

Rockets could be adapted to carry missiles and it was this that drove development.

So, when the BIS heard rumours of a new German rocket,

they should have been alarmed.

This rocket would wreak havoc as the V2.

The mastermind behind it was a space pioneer-in-waiting.

There is only one place that the breakthrough happens.

Only because of Wernher von Braun coming up with the V2 in Germany

did rocket technology get to the next stage of possibility -

that very bloody and immoral birth,

without which there wouldn't be a space age.

The invention of the V2 is very bad news for the population of London.

But for the small group of British space enthusiasts in London,

the news that the V2 exists is good.

There is, in fact, a meeting of the British Interplanetary Society,

in November 1944, to talk about the rumours that the Germans have started building big rockets.

They're all sitting around, gloomily gazing into their beer, when a V2 falls, not very far away.

There was a huge explosion. Because it travelled faster than the speed of sound,

the sound of it arriving came after the explosion.

Terrifying business.

This group, of all the groups of drinkers in London in November 1944, know what just happened.

The know what it means if there's an explosion with no sound of bombers overhead.

When the Allies later captured German scientists,

there was a chance Britain could get hold of von Braun's rocket expertise.

I was quite astonished by what we found in Germany.

It was like going into an Aladdin's cave of advanced technology.

It was, in some ways,

quite frightening to see how far along the line they'd gone

in this, if you like, rocket technology.

As a test pilot with specialist engineering knowledge and rudimentary German,

Eric Brown helped interrogate the German scientists.

Most of the scientists were not really politically motivated.

What motivated them was, they were given the opportunity to practise their profession,

with huge financial backing.

And, of course, it was their country,

and I'm sure there was a sense of patriotism involved.

The prize capture was Wernher von Braun.

All the Allies coveted his rocket expertise.

But he engineered his capture to be on US-controlled territory.

He was full of confidence

that he felt he was giving himself as a gift to us.

This was because he was a brilliant scientist, no doubt about it.

Von Braun, of course, himself had huge ideas in his own mind

of where this was all going to lead to.

I would say he and an elite group of his scientists

knew what the potential was,

which lesser men had not thought about.

Von Braun said, "Why did we decide to surrender to the US?

"Because we despised the French, we feared the Russians and the British could not afford us."

If the best prize went to the US, what did the UK take from Germany?

Water and hair dye... Well, not exactly.

This apparently innocuous mixture

became a very special ingredient in the British rocket quest.

Britain got, and later turned into its trademark,

the German work on high test peroxide, or HTP.

Hydrogen peroxide is the same stuff used in hair bleacher.

It's what makes peroxide blondes,

except, the peroxide used to turn hair blonde is a 4% concentration.

What you use in rockets is 20 times as concentrated.

Peroxide is H2O2 water with an extra oxygen atom.

It looks and pours like water and it's convenient as you can treat it like water.

We will go over to C site and see a demonstration of a gamma engine.

The firing officer is just going into the control room.

This gamma is another unit which we have developed here.

It forms a basis of the Black Knight engine developed by Armstrong Siddeley Motors.

In a matter of seconds, this engine will fire.

I'll just hang on for a minute...

Five...four...three...two...one...

-fire!

-Here we go.

'You don't need complicated pyrotechnic ignition systems.

'All you have to do is to get your HTP blending with your rocket fuel

'and the rocket runs on its own.'

It's hard to believe that this simple mixture would give Britain

a leading edge in the space race.

Well, whatever you think of rockets, you must admit that that's beautiful.

It is a very characteristic technology for the British effort,

because it offers an elegant simplification.

It's a way of being brilliant by side-stepping some of the problems

other countries were getting bogged down on.

Britain had by-passed the ignition problem - the only difficulty now?

HTP was very dangerous and could spontaneously combust.

The rule was that you worked in twos, one man doing the job,

doing these nuts, or whatever,

and the other man is standing by with a hosepipe running all the time.

If you're undoing a nut and something were to splash a little,

straightaway the other man would hose your hand, you, whatever it was.

We never had to use the next stage, but at all test sites, there were large baths

for personnel immersion. So if your mate caught fire, you'd throw him in,

because it's the only way to extinguish, you could save his life.

A number of people ended up in the baths without being on fire.

Someone said "Fire!" and threw the bloke in! It was a laugh. It'd be your turn next!

While HTP was being investigated, the development of the hydrogen bomb was exercising Western minds.

It needed a delivery system. A rocket that would turn it into a ballistic weapon.

Britain responded by developing Blue Streak.

It was a solid fuel rocket,

capable of launching a nuclear warhead from the British coast, out of the atmosphere and onto Moscow.

It was one of many rockets developed at this time.

They were primarily aimed as a deterrent.

But the technology could be applied to other things and we knew this.

We weren't given time to think about it, just carry on with the job.

All rockets underwent rigorous static testing in the British Isles,

from Cumbria, to the Midlands, to the Isle of Wight.

The British programme had to fit into the smaller,

more crowded geography of 1960's England.

It didn't happen in the wilderness, it happened with the rest of British life going on around it.

The test bed in the Midlands,

got complaints from the maternity hospital next door about noise.

The tests were certainly loud and looked alarmingly scary.

We fired it for ten seconds to start with. Then we'd work up to 60 or 90.

It was incredibly noisy, is my memory, and huge clouds of steam.

We all stood a long way back because early on,

a few had blown up, so it was a good idea to stand well away.

The rockets didn't stay in one place. Often they were moved between firing stations.

It was assembled into a vehicle and taken to Highdown.

There was this rather steep cliff.

We had two test stands, not launch stands -

you didn't let things go.

Everybody coming into Southampton could see this very strange site of a jet of super-heated steam

firing sideways out of the white cliffs of the Isle of Wight.

One engineer suggested that they paint on the side of a shed, "Home of the British Space Programme"

but his bosses said, "No, no, no. That would be against security and it would be boasting as well."

At the time, you didn't explain to your family what you were doing.

I think my kids had some idea I was involved with rockets, but...

what we were up to, they'd no idea.

My father was convinced I was in the space programme - he told his friends I was orbiting,

which was a bit of an embarrassment!

But the main problem with British testing

was that nowhere was quite remote enough to fully let the rockets go.

So the British Government turned to the Australians.

-REPORTER:

-That's the end of a successful test.

The rocket will now be sent to Australia. Here it is in its crate.

And now all is ready for the flight halfway round the world to Woomera.

We were all pushing against timescale, all the way along.

That's what made it exciting.

A date was fixed for flying and you had to have things ready.

If you missed the boat, it was three months till the next one!

We only had one firing team so we could only fire four a year, at best.

But it was also an arrangement where the project wasn't to cost too much.

As long as we didn't spend over £2 million a year, the RE was in charge.

Unless you'd driven down range at Woomera, you didn't quite realise how bad the outback can be.

I know the first time I went, I thought, "This is a joke."

They took me to a cairn where Giles' favourite camel had died of thirst.

You suddenly realised that the water you brought was the only one within 350 miles of where you were.

Rockets from all over the world were taken to Woomera.

In its five decades as a launch pad, 4,000 rockets in all were launched from there.

# Call out the instigator

# Because there's something in the air

# We got to get together sooner or later

# Because the revolution's here

# And you know it's right... #

When you stood at the launcher, you got to the 30-second countdown,

and you just sat there, and it went up! And it goes straight up,

rather fast, you know! So they disappear into the blue yonder in no time at all.

And all the things you're there for happen out of sight.

You stand there and say, "I wonder what's happened!"

I know we designed experiments with ideas of what was going to happen.

When we sat and observed it, it wasn't like that at all. We'd go back and say, "The theory's wrong, lads!"

It was assumed that Woomera would become this Commonwealth spaceport,

that all kinds of space exploration missions would begin there.

There were any number of sci-fi stories written during this period

that had the first mission to the moon beginning from Australia with a British/Australian crew -

a great expectation that we would be there conquering space.

But, of course, the Russians got there first.

When the Sputnik satellite was launched on October 4th 1957,

it set in train fears that Russia could attack the West from space.

-Do you admire the Russians?

-No. We should've been the first to have it.

We fear they have something out there most people don't know about.

Somebody's falling down on the job.

As atomic testing and space science quickly gathered pace,

public anxiety grew.

Were scientific endeavours being achieved at the expense of mankind?

Belief in UFOs and beings from other planets were rife.

The TV of the day highlighted these concerns.

Earth, as you call it,

faces...a certain situation.

A dangerous one.

You are liable to upset...

the balance of your Earth...

through...number one...

atomic experimentation, and, number two...

your deviation from the spiritual laws.

What Mr King is really doing,

perhaps through what may well be total delusion is, nevertheless,

uttering, in symbolic form, the cry of anxiety that divides our world.

That our scientific interest has outrun our wisdom and humanity,

and we're afraid it may outrun our existence.

We delude ourselves to think there is no significance in these fears.

Fears about rockets were matched in magnitude by a very British economic concern.

Britain was very hard up after the war, of course.

We were a bankrupt country.

We helped to get Germany back on its feet financially.

The result was our own industries were neglected.

It was a very sad period.

In the late 1950s as a BBC reporter, Reg Turnhill asked Minister of Supply, Aubrey Jones,

about Government funding and got a typical response.

-Why has it been done so cheaply?

-We do all our research on a shoestring compared with the US.

We're forced to by limited resources.

Britain had lots of big brains people.

They drifted away. Most of our best brains

went off to work in America. That was known as the Brain Drain.

With such an attitude,

it was no surprise when the Macmillan Government cancelled Blue Streak in 1960.

Costs were soaring and the proposed rocket silos on the Norfolk coast,

were deemed too close to North Sea oil rigs, in themselves a target.

It was cheaper for the UK to buy Polaris from the USA.

Military development on Blue Streak stopped.

It would have its place in future space plans, but, for the moment, it was destined to the scrap heap.

In 1975, the BBC's Horizon programme

took engineer Geoffrey Pardoe to an abandoned Blue Streak hangar.

The only Blue Streak rocket still intact, lies in an old hangar.

It's a sad relic of Britain's prouder days.

The heart of the whole thing came back to the two Rolls-Royce rocket engines here.

Together they produced about 250,000 pounds of thrust,

with the liquid propellant being delivered from the turbo pumps inside this bay - very high technology -

and then the tank section ahead of this.

This got a very bad press,

but it worked every time in its development shots.

It was one of the most successful rockets.

This slightly stiffened kerosene bay and the liquid oxygen tank here -

it's really just a long, pressurized, stainless steel balloon.

The wall thickness - 19 thousandths of an inch...

BANGING ..a few thicknesses of paper.

The pressure in it kept it stiff throughout its flight and allowed the very low weight to be achieved,

so the propulsion system could carry the warhead, which would've been in this bay.

But Blue Streak wasn't quite dead.

It would have a role in space research.

With input from the French, Italians, and West Germans,

ELDO - the European Launcher Development Organisation -

was set up to develop a European satellite launcher called Europa.

Blue Streak was to be used as its first stage.

And snapping at Europa's heels was a new solely-British venture called Black Arrow.

Black Arrow would use the British signature technology of high-test peroxide,

now engineered almost to perfection since the war.

But government investment in the satellite launcher was limited.

'You do what you can.

'We ran projects with all the logic of how things work together.'

And when you can't get things done,

you have to repackage the programme to see how you can save time.

While the British made do on threadbare budgets,

more wealthy nations competed for space milestones.

Russia launched the first man into space,

and Reg Turnill was there to find out more.

My colleague Reginald Turnill, the BBC's air correspondent, is here.

Reg, come and join me just one second.

If you had any chance of asking questions at this press conference,

-what would be the one you would put?

-We still don't know how the Russians can launch these things.

Whether they've got just very big rockets of the sort we use,

or whether they have special fuel that we don't know about.

HIS WORDS ARE TRANSLATED: This was a major achievement for Soviet science and for our country,

but it was also a major achievement for world science and for the people of the whole world.

The space race was entirely military oriented.

We wouldn't have landed a man on the moon now

if there hadn't been this contest

between the Russians and America to get to the moon,

because the military men put forward this crazy idea,

and I was briefed about it many times,

that the man on the high ground dominates the world.

So the theory was that you'd better get to the moon first,

because whoever was at the moon would call the tune militarily.

It was the USA that won the goal for which Wernher von Braun had defected to the West.

Some British scientists were also part of the brain drain that helped Apollo 11

put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin onto the surface of the moon.

In my view, the Americans had got to the moon

on German rockets, American dollars and British brains.

It was not wholly true, but there was a lot in it.

'NASA soak up budgets like nobody's business,

'and, sadly, don't produce the results

'that we could've done on a cheaper basis with smaller teams.

'They have enormous teams. We said they trample their problems to death,

'whereas we had to sit down and solve them at a desk.

When it comes down to it, they're not producing anything better than we were.

By 1971, British Politicians were getting twitchy.

Debate was raging over whether the UK should continue with rocket development

while the USA was offering us free piggyback rides into space.

British money could surely be spent better on public services.

Meanwhile, Black Arrow was on its way to Australia

to prepare for an all-British milestone -

the launching of a satellite into space.

Heath's Minister for Aerospace stood up in the House of Commons

and announced that the Black Arrow programme was cancelled.

But the engineers were given the chance

to try to prove their system just once more,

since the rocket was already on its way, everything was already in place.

So they knew before they tried to launch

that, succeed or fail, the programme was already over.

That success was not actually going to accomplish anything.

The satellite due to be launched into orbit underwent a name change.

Instead of Puck, the Shakespearean sprite who flies around the world with ease,

the engineers renamed it Prospero, after the tired magician who lays down his books.

Could they pull off one last magic trick,

to prove that Britain could get into orbit?

Man years of their work, and their dedication, and their passion,

and their very serious professional design skills,

were invested in this thing.

So, with the most loving caution imaginable,

the team set it up on its launch site at Woomera,

and began the countdown, stopping for anything

that looked as if it could conceivably go wrong, because this was their last chance.

But nothing did go wrong.

The last flight of Black Arrow was successful,

and the satellite Prospero was launched over 550km into orbit.

Great elation all round the department.

The little ministry man turned up at the office,

and we got together to listen to him, cos we thought

he'd come to say how well we'd done and what the next phase would be,

and all the little so-and-so had come to tell us was,

"It was a good job, wasn't it? Please wrap it up and send the bill in."

And it's resented even to this day.

You can talk to people and they'll say, "It was a bad day, wasn't it?"

Any mention of Prospero, and they'll almost start to weep.

The British Government thought it had learned by experience,

in the 1960s, that space was a waste of money.

The irony here is that the last ride of the Black Arrow

happens only a very few years before the great age of the commercial satellite begins,

when all of the money which had been fired up in orbit started raining down.

Ariane, which the French went ahead with,

as much for reasons of national technological pride,

as from commercial calculations

was a commercial success,

because it was there already in the late-1970s.

Black Arrow would now be a very handy rocket launcher.

There are lots of 100kg satellites it would be nice to launch...

The UK pulled out of rocketry all together

and we settled down...

The Government decided that our scientific establishments

could provide components

for other people's satellites

and expertise, and so on.

So we became small-bit players in the whole thing.

The old imperial power, Great Britain, was starting to lose her way.

She reduced her majority share in the European Launcher Development Organisation

and pulled out British engineers.

Whereas the farsighted French carried on with the profitable launching business,

British rocket engineering became a thing of the past.

Over the next few decades, UK governments wavered with intermittent space funding

and a largely fruitless search for private investment.

Our politicians have taken the view... I know it was true from how they worked with the French,

that if we'd got something small that wanted launching, you asked one of the others to do it for you.

This brings us to the point where the British Government made, years back, a decision

that they would distance themselves from what they call launchers. Not satellites - they still make those.

They always screw it to the side of a bus, if you like, that happened to be going the right way,

and ask them to kick it off at a certain Tube station. It goes into its own little orbit

and the rest goes on to something else. This is very sad.

That ruins all the work that we did - it throws it in the bin

because the technology for making satellites smaller, better, more capable,

doesn't require any rocket-engine technology at all.

It meant that instead of being the second-last nation,

as we were after the war,

we're now the third-last nation. Nobody thinks we can afford to do anything.

We could, really. It's just, the French decide to do something and worry about the money after.

The rest of the 20th century saw Britain half-heartedly supporting various space projects.

The HOTOL - horizontal takeoff and landing - idea came and went.

The British National Space Centre was set up...

This is an exciting time for space and a very important day for the space industry in Britain.

..and then hit badly by withdrawal of funding seven years later.

When Halley's Comet came, British-built Giotto was there to photograph it.

But, a year later, the UK effectively pulled out of the European Space Agency

by refusing to back French astronauts with British money.

MARGARET THATCHER: It is correct that we have not been able to find the extremely considerable amount

of extra expenditure that was requested...

We shall continue our subscription to the European Space Agency,

but we are not able to find more money.

It seemed the British had deserted the questing space spirit

until only very recently.

Good evening. Look up into the southeast fairly late on,

and you will see the red planet Mars.

In August, it will be as close to us as it will ever be -

less than 35 million miles.

Can there be life there?

That's what we want to find out,

and, I think, soon we'll do so.

By the 21st century, Britain's main technological focus had drifted to satellites and probes

and received little attention from the public.

But then Mars came close to Earth, and British scientists had a chance

to get there. The public found themselves enthralled.

30 seconds to go. Will this search for life on Mars

get off the ground? There's no stopping the countdown now.

The ignition is about to begin...

Any second, the main engines will start. There they go right now.

You can see the flames. There's so much riding on this.

Europe's first mission to Mars, Britain's first attempt to find life beyond Earth.

Here it goes! Any second now!

When the Beagle probe was launched from Kazakhstan on a Russian rocket,

British scientist Professor Colin Pillinger and his team stepped back into the arena of space,

where Britain had always been a third-class citizen.

We couldn't wait. Mars was the closest it was ever going to be.

We knew we had one chance, and we were gonna go for it

in a single shot.

In the spirit of great explorers, it was decided to name the probe Beagle 2,

after Darwin's to find new life forms on the HMS Beagle expedition to South America.

Pillinger played up the pioneer explorer role of his own search for life on Mars,

and the media indulgently reported the project as Britain's latest great boffin space quest.

'Professor Colin Pillinger is proud that his Mars space craft,

'Beagle II,

'fits in a supermarket trolley.

'This is eccentric, under-funded British science at its best.'

These are some of the people who'll be running Beagle II.

When we think of mission control, we imagine a huge room in NASA with hundreds of people.

For Beagle II, this is mission control -

an upstairs room at the Open University in Milton Keynes.

The Beagle was over-hyped

and this was why it was such a disappointment.

It got too much publicity for once.

'Hopes of finding the Beagle II Mars probe are fading rapidly.

'Scientists have admitted the best chance of making contact

'with Beagle II has failed.

'The Beagle's chief scientist wasn't giving up and would hear no talk of failure.'

We have demonstrated that people are interested in science and technology.

And we have to capitalise on that.

Space missions go wrong at launch.

In the case of Beagle,

we always looked at everything we achieved as another tick in the box.

The team knew the risks and the things you had to do.

The media were almost more broken-hearted than we were

when we didn't get that signal from Beagle II.

People were really taken by surprise

when Beagle II became famous.

They were surprised to know they could hope for Britain to do that thing,

because Britain does virtual engineering these days.

It's because of Beagle that people are now thinking again

about the almost forgotten history of the British space programme.

You have to appreciate

that it isn't easy to launch things into space and it isn't easy to get to Mars.

I would be very sad if people took this

as a one-off nasty dream,

it's now gone away, we'll never do this again.

Because it is absolutely certain

that if we'd kept going in the rocket programme,

it would have been Blue Streak, not Arian.

I wish we could have made more of it.

But I understand why we couldn't.

I really do want to know what's out there.

Up in our roof at home, there's a long shelf

of projects that might have been, and still people don't want them.

I said to my wife, "Shall we throw these out?"

She said, "No, the world hasn't caught up yet."

They're still there and we did experiments to prove they'd work.

And it's very frustrating, but that's life.

We should remember that both Australia and Britain had the vision of space.

The dream has always been there and it remains there.

And although you can look back and say with some bitterness at times,

"Look what we gave up!"

You can also look back and say, "Look what we achieved."

In some way, the peculiarities of British boffins

are a sign of the threadbare footing they have to do their engineering on.

What we need to do is to retire boffins

and have engineers instead, preferably with large enough budgets.

We should be getting back into manned space flight.

That's the only way we're going to encourage our young people.

It's never too late. It's not good to be late, but better late than never.

Subtitles by BBC Broadcast Ltd - 2004

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