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British rocketry and space development
Space Policy 17 (2001) 227–228
Report
British rocketry and space development Duncan Lunan* Flat 65, Dalriada House, 56 Blythswood Court, Anderston, Glasgow G2 7PE, UK
Editor’s Introduction Compared with French and German space activities, Britain’s current space programme is often considered small beer. Yet this was not always the case. British efforts in the 1950s were highly successful and even ahead of their time, but unfortunately not appreciated by government. The British Rocketry Oral History Project aims to preserve Britain’s early record and holds annual conferences featuring those venerable players who are still alive to further this aim. This report, and the one that follows it, summarises the talks and activities that took place during the 2000 and 2001 conferences, respectively. Although asked only once in so many words, the question ‘‘Where did it all go wrong?’’ hung over the annual conference of the British Rocketry Oral History Project (BROHP), at Charterhouse School, Godalming, Surrey, on 6–7 April 2000. Headed by Dave Wright and Nick Hill, physics and history teachers, BROHP aims to record the history of the former British space programme, through study of the surviving documents and the memories of those who took part. Rather than a conference of top scientists or media personalities, this one featured elderly gentlemen who once did great things, and researchers who wanted to know how they did them. A recurring theme was how little their efforts were appreciated at the time. Parliament, the civil service and the media were united in the belief that it was all too little, too late, too expensive and inferior to what was being done in the USA. Yet Britain had a successful rocket-propelled fighter, the Saunders-Roe 53, something the Americans had never achieved. It was described at the conference by its chief designer, Ray Wheeler, and Dick Stratten, Project Manager. The more advanced SR 177 was capable of intercepting Soviet bombers over the North Sea, at Mach 2 and at 60,000 feet, carrying two air-to-air missiles, and the RAF had *Tel.: +44-0-141-221-7658. E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Lunan). 0265-9646/01/$ - see front matter r 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. PII: S 0 2 6 5 - 9 6 4 6 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 3 2 - 7
ordered 27, with an option for another 70, before the government cancelled it all in favour of the unmanned Bloodhound missile. Similarly the Black Knight, developed as a test vehicle for advanced technology and as a sounding rocket, had twice the speed and four times the altitude of the next best in the world, the American Viking, yet it was repeatedly derided as a pointless failure. Roy Dommett, now a Chief Consultant to DERA, described re-entry experiments using the rocket. The Blue Streak missile which followed was indeed obsolescent as a deterrent by the time it was perfected, but, considered as a satellite launcher, it incorporated top-of-the-range rocket engines and had a reliability which the Americans could only dream of and the Russians can scarcely match even today. With a Black Knight derivative as an upper stage it could out-perform the Atlas, the most powerful US booster at the time, as Nick Hill explained. A commercial communications satellite was being developed for it, and studies of a man-carrying payload led the late Prof. Terence Nonweiler to invent the Waverider atmosphere entry vehicle, which is now being developed in NASA’s LO-FLYTE programme. But the Macmillan and Wilson governments had no interest in any of those: their scientific advisors could see it only in terms of expensive research payloads, which the Americans could launch for us, and one of the exhibits at the BROHP conference was a letter from the Post Office, which then had a monopoly of British telecommunications, saying that there was no commercial future for communications satellites. Instead Britain embarked on a joint venture with Europe, for purely political reasons, and abandoned it when the European upper stages were unsuccessful at firstFleaving France to develop the second stage into Ariane. Dr Gill Staerck of the Institute of Contemporary British History and Rob Baker of the University of London gave comprehensive analyses of how this came about, while we learned from Wayne Cockroft of English Heritage that the British space programme now comes under the heading of Industrial Archaeology. The irony, Nick Hill suggested in his paper, was that on this level Black Knight and Blue Streak were ahead of their time: ten
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D. Lunan / Space Policy 17 (2001) 227–228
years later, their commercial potential would have been obvious. And once the combination booster was developed, it could also have been used for manned spaceflight, interplanetary probes and the many other applications now being developed for Ariane. At any conference like this the surprise revelations are often the most valuable, and one concerned the late Terence Nonweiler, former Professor of Aeronautics at Glasgow University, who died in December 1999. I was asked to give a tribute to Nonweiler and to relate the history of the Waverider. Nonweiler was always reticent about his background, but Roy Dommett told me that he built his reputation with top-secret work during World War II, working out the characteristics of the German V2 rocket from wreckage smuggled out of occupied Europe. Like all good conferences it also had its lighter moments, and some are worth mentioning. The SR 53 was fuelled with highly corrosive 98% pure hydrogen peroxide, and the vehicles in which it was transported had been snaffled by the British Army from Peenemunde. If the polythene tanks sprang a leak after being installed into the aircraft, the safest thing to do was to take off immediatelyFa much quicker way of emptying the tanks than conventional drainage! Commenting on a photograph in which he stood next to a live firing, Dick Stratten remarked, ‘‘Health and Safety hadn’t been invented so we did our own thing’’. Britain’s nuclear weapons programme was closely tied to the rocketry, and Doug Bateman of DERA gave a detailed account of their relationship. The work of adapting Britain’s bombers to carry the various types of bomb was done in a secure area at Farnborough, and to the staff there, the annual Air Show was just another working day. We were treated to amazing photographs of bombers being fitted with live nuclear weapons, with vast crowds on the other side of the runwaysFall,
naturally, far too British and well-behaved to take notice of what they should not. The Blue Steel stand-off bomb was discussed by Terry Dike, former chief engineer at Hunting Engineering, and other experts from A.V. Roe and the Aberporth rocket range. In the later stages of the space programme, when the Australian government was reluctant to commit more funds to it, apparently there was a serious proposal to take Blue Streak launches away from Woomera. The alternative site, where pads, assembly facilities and control rooms were already in place, was Spadeadam Waste in Cumberland [now Cumbria] where the rockets’ engines were tested before shipping to Australia. The only problem about launching from Spadeadam was that the boosters would fly directly over Kelso in the Scottish Borders. A safety analysis indicated that the risk was minor; and in an eerie moment of prophecy, it pointed out that the consequences would be much worse if a fuelled-up Boeing were to fall on a town in the Borders after leaving London. After the nostalgic tone of the BROHP conference, a more positive note was sounded the next day in Blackfriars, London. A substantial number of spaceflight societies in the UK met to discuss common aims and purposes. It was decided to form a Space Development Council which would advocate, in particular, support for the Spaceguard organisation, which aims to establish an international programme to detect hazardous asteroids and comets. It will also call for a reversal of the UK’s current attitude to manned spaceflightFand as it happened, the European Space Agency had then just released a long-term planning report which calls for hotels and power stations in orbit, industrial uses of lunar material, and manned missions to Mars. If the Space Development Council has its way, the story of Britain in space will be far from over.
Report
British rocketry and space development Duncan Lunan* Flat 65, Dalriada House, 56 Blythswood Court, Anderston, Glasgow G2 7PE, UK
Editor’s Introduction Compared with French and German space activities, Britain’s current space programme is often considered small beer. Yet this was not always the case. British efforts in the 1950s were highly successful and even ahead of their time, but unfortunately not appreciated by government. The British Rocketry Oral History Project aims to preserve Britain’s early record and holds annual conferences featuring those venerable players who are still alive to further this aim. This report, and the one that follows it, summarises the talks and activities that took place during the 2000 and 2001 conferences, respectively. Although asked only once in so many words, the question ‘‘Where did it all go wrong?’’ hung over the annual conference of the British Rocketry Oral History Project (BROHP), at Charterhouse School, Godalming, Surrey, on 6–7 April 2000. Headed by Dave Wright and Nick Hill, physics and history teachers, BROHP aims to record the history of the former British space programme, through study of the surviving documents and the memories of those who took part. Rather than a conference of top scientists or media personalities, this one featured elderly gentlemen who once did great things, and researchers who wanted to know how they did them. A recurring theme was how little their efforts were appreciated at the time. Parliament, the civil service and the media were united in the belief that it was all too little, too late, too expensive and inferior to what was being done in the USA. Yet Britain had a successful rocket-propelled fighter, the Saunders-Roe 53, something the Americans had never achieved. It was described at the conference by its chief designer, Ray Wheeler, and Dick Stratten, Project Manager. The more advanced SR 177 was capable of intercepting Soviet bombers over the North Sea, at Mach 2 and at 60,000 feet, carrying two air-to-air missiles, and the RAF had *Tel.: +44-0-141-221-7658. E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Lunan). 0265-9646/01/$ - see front matter r 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. PII: S 0 2 6 5 - 9 6 4 6 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 3 2 - 7
ordered 27, with an option for another 70, before the government cancelled it all in favour of the unmanned Bloodhound missile. Similarly the Black Knight, developed as a test vehicle for advanced technology and as a sounding rocket, had twice the speed and four times the altitude of the next best in the world, the American Viking, yet it was repeatedly derided as a pointless failure. Roy Dommett, now a Chief Consultant to DERA, described re-entry experiments using the rocket. The Blue Streak missile which followed was indeed obsolescent as a deterrent by the time it was perfected, but, considered as a satellite launcher, it incorporated top-of-the-range rocket engines and had a reliability which the Americans could only dream of and the Russians can scarcely match even today. With a Black Knight derivative as an upper stage it could out-perform the Atlas, the most powerful US booster at the time, as Nick Hill explained. A commercial communications satellite was being developed for it, and studies of a man-carrying payload led the late Prof. Terence Nonweiler to invent the Waverider atmosphere entry vehicle, which is now being developed in NASA’s LO-FLYTE programme. But the Macmillan and Wilson governments had no interest in any of those: their scientific advisors could see it only in terms of expensive research payloads, which the Americans could launch for us, and one of the exhibits at the BROHP conference was a letter from the Post Office, which then had a monopoly of British telecommunications, saying that there was no commercial future for communications satellites. Instead Britain embarked on a joint venture with Europe, for purely political reasons, and abandoned it when the European upper stages were unsuccessful at firstFleaving France to develop the second stage into Ariane. Dr Gill Staerck of the Institute of Contemporary British History and Rob Baker of the University of London gave comprehensive analyses of how this came about, while we learned from Wayne Cockroft of English Heritage that the British space programme now comes under the heading of Industrial Archaeology. The irony, Nick Hill suggested in his paper, was that on this level Black Knight and Blue Streak were ahead of their time: ten
228
D. Lunan / Space Policy 17 (2001) 227–228
years later, their commercial potential would have been obvious. And once the combination booster was developed, it could also have been used for manned spaceflight, interplanetary probes and the many other applications now being developed for Ariane. At any conference like this the surprise revelations are often the most valuable, and one concerned the late Terence Nonweiler, former Professor of Aeronautics at Glasgow University, who died in December 1999. I was asked to give a tribute to Nonweiler and to relate the history of the Waverider. Nonweiler was always reticent about his background, but Roy Dommett told me that he built his reputation with top-secret work during World War II, working out the characteristics of the German V2 rocket from wreckage smuggled out of occupied Europe. Like all good conferences it also had its lighter moments, and some are worth mentioning. The SR 53 was fuelled with highly corrosive 98% pure hydrogen peroxide, and the vehicles in which it was transported had been snaffled by the British Army from Peenemunde. If the polythene tanks sprang a leak after being installed into the aircraft, the safest thing to do was to take off immediatelyFa much quicker way of emptying the tanks than conventional drainage! Commenting on a photograph in which he stood next to a live firing, Dick Stratten remarked, ‘‘Health and Safety hadn’t been invented so we did our own thing’’. Britain’s nuclear weapons programme was closely tied to the rocketry, and Doug Bateman of DERA gave a detailed account of their relationship. The work of adapting Britain’s bombers to carry the various types of bomb was done in a secure area at Farnborough, and to the staff there, the annual Air Show was just another working day. We were treated to amazing photographs of bombers being fitted with live nuclear weapons, with vast crowds on the other side of the runwaysFall,
naturally, far too British and well-behaved to take notice of what they should not. The Blue Steel stand-off bomb was discussed by Terry Dike, former chief engineer at Hunting Engineering, and other experts from A.V. Roe and the Aberporth rocket range. In the later stages of the space programme, when the Australian government was reluctant to commit more funds to it, apparently there was a serious proposal to take Blue Streak launches away from Woomera. The alternative site, where pads, assembly facilities and control rooms were already in place, was Spadeadam Waste in Cumberland [now Cumbria] where the rockets’ engines were tested before shipping to Australia. The only problem about launching from Spadeadam was that the boosters would fly directly over Kelso in the Scottish Borders. A safety analysis indicated that the risk was minor; and in an eerie moment of prophecy, it pointed out that the consequences would be much worse if a fuelled-up Boeing were to fall on a town in the Borders after leaving London. After the nostalgic tone of the BROHP conference, a more positive note was sounded the next day in Blackfriars, London. A substantial number of spaceflight societies in the UK met to discuss common aims and purposes. It was decided to form a Space Development Council which would advocate, in particular, support for the Spaceguard organisation, which aims to establish an international programme to detect hazardous asteroids and comets. It will also call for a reversal of the UK’s current attitude to manned spaceflightFand as it happened, the European Space Agency had then just released a long-term planning report which calls for hotels and power stations in orbit, industrial uses of lunar material, and manned missions to Mars. If the Space Development Council has its way, the story of Britain in space will be far from over.