Category A VERTICAL EMPIRE

Two stage. Launched 24 April 1965 at 20:32. Apogee 404.6 miles.

Both the main stage and second stage performance was satisfactory. The re­entry head was a GW 20 shape made from copper. A thicker rope was used to retard the sabot, but again it broke without retarding the sabot significantly. The copper cone disintegrated on re-entry, and the tape recorder was not found until two months after the trial.

It can be argued that the Cold War became a war of resources, and one in which the UK effectively dropped out of at the start of the 1960s. It could be further argued that the collapse of Communism in Russia was also due to the collapse of a command economy directed to large military and technological programmes. However, let us concentrate on the UK.

As already mentioned, most of the projects discussed so far were military in origin, but many were never carried through to completion. This is not unique to the UK; similar cancellations happen in all countries developing new technology. One of the major factors contributing to the cancellation of such projects, not only in the UK but in the US, was the very rapid advance in technology during the 1950s.

In many ways, the major aerospace technologies, with the exception of computing and electronics, had become mature by the mid-1960s. Thus the jet engine, the rocket motor, supersonic aircraft and the rest had been successfully developed by this time. There have obviously been improvements, but they have been incremental rather than breakthroughs into new areas. It is also interesting that up until the 1970s, almost all technological advances came from government and military projects, whereas today the main driving force seems to be business and consumer interests, most notably in electronics and computing. Military spending is no longer the great driver of projects that it once was.

After the cancellation of Blue Streak there was virtually no further military interest in long-range missiles. The UK was left with the legacy of the work done so far on Blue Streak and Black Knight to pursue a rather half-hearted space programme. Considerable muddle in the subsequent policy left the UK disillusioned with space research – or, at least, with launchers – with the inevitable cancellations later in the 1960s.

The question then comes: why, when America, Russia and France were pursuing space exploration with vigour, and why, when countries such as China and India are launching satellites almost as a matter of routine, has the UK shown such little interest both at government level and among the people at large?

A useful German word can be used here: the Zeitgeist, which might be translated as ‘the spirit of the times’, or the outlook characteristic of the period. America and Russia were pursuing their race in space as a way of fighting the Cold War at one remove, in an attempt to show the rest of the world who was technologically the more sophisticated. Britain had no such interest: at the end of the 1950s it was beginning the long retreat from Empire, and at the same time beginning to suffer from the economic and social ills which were to plague the country for the next 30 or 40 years. Another phrase has been used of the government at this time: ‘managing the decline’. A country that feels itself to be in decline does not embark on new, challenging technological challenges.

As mentioned earlier, Macmillan’s initial announcement in Parliament in 1959 was greeted with the response: ‘… is it just an attempt to keep up with the Joneses?’ This was a fairly common attitude, as when Thorneycroft, then Minister of Aviation, was interviewed on television about the proposed Blue Streak launcher and ELDO in 1961. Ministers, when interviewed on television, have to expect difficult questions – but the tone of the questioning is interesting.

Mr. Mackenzie: But couldn’t it be argued that we, in Britain, have after all only a limited number of technologists available, even in any aspect of this area and that we might be better advised to get them off working, for example, in exploration of the problem of supersonic aircraft, or some more obviously commercial operation, rather than this rather exhibitionist activity of rocketeering?

Minister: There’s nothing exhibitionist about the brilliant Rolls Royce and de Havilland engineers who’ve, incidentally, done a great deal more than keep this in mothballs. We’ve just done two fully integrated static firings. The work is going well ahead and the Americans will tell you themselves that the payoff in other forms of industry – in metallurgy, electronics and the rest – have wide application to civil industry as a whole, is very great if we go into it.

Mr. Mackenzie: But are we remotely in this competition? One knows how very far the Russians have gone, and the Americans and one has the awful feeling that this is the kind of feeble rearguard, final action to show the flag.

Minister: Don’t be so depressed, Robert. This is not a rearguard action at all. We are in this for eternity, all of us. It isn’t just the question of doing it with the Atlas or the Blue Streak. We shall be making these rockets: I hope we shall be making them in Europe for a long time ahead, with great advantage to ourselves, to the world and to all the countries, including the smaller ones, that are in it.1

‘Exhibitionist activity of racketeering’, ‘feeble rear guard action’. And another quote from Mackenzie later in the interview: ‘But I don’t understand why, if the Americans are offering a launcher – which is presumably more advanced than the one we have – Blue Streak – why we may as well not write off Blue Streak and use their launcher for whatever purposes we’ve got in mind.’

And Mackenzie was wrong. Blue Streak was actually based on American technology, but it could be argued that in the process of anglicisation that a considerable number of improvements had been made.

Another example of the same frame of mind (and the frame of mind perpetually adopted by the Treasury) can be seen in a note from the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, John Boyd Carpenter, in July 1963:

Like other post-war establishments such as Harwell and Aldermaston, Westcott was originally an RAF airfield before being taken over in 1946 as the Guided Projectile Establishment. In 1947 its status changed to the Rocket Propulsion Department of RAE, and then in 1958 it became the Rocket Propulsion Establishment.

A good deal of work was done on solid motors (all named after birds, since the Superintendent was a keen ornithologist), but in addition, there was a good deal of early work done on liquid motors using HTP involving German engineers who had come to Britain at the end of the war. These were the Alpha, Beta and Gamma series of motors. The Delta was a low-key liquid oxygen/kerosene programme, which became rather pointless once Rolls Royce began development of the RZ 1 and RZ 2 chambers. There was also a very considerable liquid hydrogen programme, producing some sophisticated chambers which could almost have been fitted directly into a rocket stage without much further work. In addition, P site was used by Rolls Royce in some early firings of the RZ 1 and RZ 2 before Spadeadam became available.

One of the major projects of the 1950s was the 1/6th scale silo, which must have been quite an impressive sight when the motors were fired inside the tube. Nothing remains of the site today, although there are still hexagonal pieces of concrete which formed the walls of the model silo to be found to this day.

Spadeadam in Cumbria was chosen as the site to test and develop the Blue Streak engines, and here Blue Streak vehicles were assembled for static firing before shipment to Australia. Rolls Royce ran the site as an agency.

The engine test area at Prior Lancy Rigg consisted of four concrete stands into which the engines could be mounted for test firing. Three remain, copied from a Rocketdyne design used at their California Santa Susana Field Laboratory site; the fourth has been demolished. This last and lost stand seems to have been built to a different design, using an innovative application of pre-stressed concrete to contain liquid oxygen spills.

Two static firing stands themselves stood at Greymare Hills and were large enough to accommodate a full Blue Streak missile. All firings were controlled from command centre bunkers connected to the stands by tunnels or surface cabling ducts.

After the demise of ELDO, Spadeadam was taken over by the RAF. Its primary purpose today is to provide a location for teaching of electronic warfare to RAF and other NATO aircrew.

The Germans pioneered the use of hydrogen peroxide as a rocket fuel in the early 1940s, powering the Me163 rocket fighter, and the V2’s turbine and fuel pump. British work was to take this much further. The key to a successful HTP motor is the choice of catalyst. When the HTP is passed over a suitable catalyst, it decomposes into steam and oxygen, and the decomposition is sufficiently energetic for the HTP to be used as a monopropellant. However, it is much more effective then to inject a fuel into the steam and oxygen. In British rocket motors this was always kerosene. The kerosene ignites spontaneously in the hot gases. Silver plated nickel gauze was used as the catalyst, and such catalyst packs could be easily inserted into the rocket chamber. The ratio of HTP to kerosene was around 8 : 1. Although the combination does not give a very high S. I. compared with many other fuel combinations, it has other advantages. Not being cryogenic, it can be left in the vehicle and does not need topping up. Nor does it need insulation as liquid hydrogen does: the insulation adds to the vehicle weight. Further, HTP is quite dense, 1375 kg/m3, as opposed to 80 kg/m3 for liquid hydrogen. This makes for a very much smaller volume and thus smaller tanks, again saving on vehicle weight. The later rockets developed by the UK using HTP technology were structurally very efficient.

Other engines were then developed using this combination: Spectre, Sprite, Scorpion, Stentor and Gamma. These were initially for aircraft use, although Stentor would be used in the Blue Steel stand-off missile, and Gamma would go on to power Black Knight and Black Arrow. Most of these were developed by commercial firms: Scorpion by Napiers; Sprite and Spectre by de Havilland; Stentor and later Gammas by Armstrong Siddeley, as they were then. Sprite and Super Sprite were designed to assist the take-off of large aircraft such as the V bombers and the Comet, but the increase in effectiveness of the jet engine meant that these units were obsolete before entering service in any major fashion. Scorpion and Spectre were intended for aircraft, to augment the jet engine. However, the HTP combination was to represent the principal British contribution to the rocket field.

The UK was to make hydrogen peroxide technology very much its own: no one before or since has made use of it on such a large scale. Early German and British work used compounds of manganese in one form or another to decompose the peroxide, often injected with the fuel, leading to a very messy exhaust. The secret lay in a metal gauze, through which the HTP was passed, and as it did so, decomposed to steam and oxygen at a temperature of around 500 °C. The gauze was made of silver coated nickel, and a catalyst pack was fitted at the top of the combustion chamber. Into these hot gases a fuel could be injected, and at that temperature they burned spontaneously, meaning there was no further ignition needed. This was very convenient, particularly in the rocket aircraft and the Blue Steel missile.

The largest HTP motor produced was the large chamber in the Stentor motor for Blue Steel, seen above, which had a thrust of around 24,000 lb at sea level. Although the small chamber would find use in Black Knight and Black Arrow, the large chamber was not developed further.

It has been argued that, in some respects, HTP was a technology in search of an application, and in some cases this was certainly true. The Sprite and Super Sprite were developed as rocket assisted take-off units for the Comet airliner and the Valiant bomber, but were far too sophisticated for simple RATO units, which were normally made from clusters of small solid fuel motors. The advantage of using several motors in clusters is that it was far less catastrophic if one failed. Having just two motors, one on either side, was much more hazardous, since the failure of one of the two would result in an off-centre thrust sufficient to make

the aircraft lose control. Such an elaborate system, whereby the used motors would be jettisoned, parachuted back to the ground, then serviced for re-use, made very little sense.

The Scorpion was produced by Napier, and a twin-chambered version, the Double Scorpion, was fitted to Canberra bombers, enabling one of them to reach a new record altitude of 70,310 ft. They were to have been used for high altitude cloud sampling at the H bomb trials at Christmas Island (Operation Grapple), but

the second Canberra was grounded during the crash investigations. There was also a proposal to fit it to the English Electric Lightning, but the Lightning’s performance proved to be quite good enough without the rocket. Rocket assisted take-off and rocket interceptors very soon became obsolete; the main contribution of HTP motors was to Black Knight, Black Arrow and Blue Steel – and it is questionable whether HTP was the correct choice for Blue Steel. However, a new use was to be found for HTP motors – in ballistic rockets. The original Gamma 201 motor for Black Knight used four Gamma chambers, a double-walled chamber developed by RPE. This chamber was later replaced by the small chamber from the Stentor motor, which used the tube-walled construction. Equally importantly, the 301 allowed better adjustment of the kerosene/HTP mixture ratio, making the motor more efficient.

The Stentor small chamber was carried over into Black Arrow, where the first stage motor, the Gamma 8, had, not surprisingly, eight chambers, arranged as four pairs. The second stage of Black Arrow was powered by the Gamma 2, which had two chambers, but with an extended expansion cone, as it would be operating in the near vacuum of altitude. This gave it a higher thrust than the first stage chambers.

There is a final footnote to British HTP work. Bristol Siddeley (who became part of Rolls Royce in 1966) were given a contract by the Ministry of Aviation to develop a high performance HTP motor of 7,500 lb thrust, following on from suggestions made by the firm in 1963. The development programme ran from January 1964 to December 19664. The chamber was designed to run at much higher pressures than usual – 1,000 psi – and a total of 118 firings were achieved, totalling 78 minutes. The thrust level of 7,500 lb was chosen deliberately so that the chamber could be used as a direct replacement for the existing Gamma chamber.

Unlike the existing Gamma chambers, the new chamber (named, for some inscrutable reason, Larch) was double-walled. The reason given for this was that ‘HTP tends to decompose on the hot surfaces in the cooling tubes, producing insoluble gases which can occupy an unacceptable proportion of the restricted passage of one or more of the tubes and lead to burnout’.

The higher chamber pressures also gave an improved S. I.:

Standard Gamma Larch

Sea level SI 217 226

Vacuum SI 251 269

The new chamber (Figure 11), would also have been slightly lighter.

Replacing the existing Gamma chamber in Black Arrow with the new improved version meant that the vehicle could be stretched. As a consequence, the payload could be increased from 232 lb in polar orbit to 375 lb.

Despite the time and money that had been spent on the development, it was not taken further. When RAE did decide to uprate Black Arrow, it went for the solid fuel strap-on booster option. The Gamma motors of Black Arrow were to be the last HTP motors to be developed, but HTP motors did put Britain’s only satellite into orbit, and it is fitting that a British developed technology was used to do so.

The events that finally led to the cancellation of Blue Streak began as a consequence of a meeting at the Prime Minister’s country home, Chequers, in June 1959, referred to in Sandys’ note above. The guest list for that weekend is quite impressive:

Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister;

Sir Norman Brook, Cabinet Secretary;

Sir Roger Makins, Joint Permanent Secretary to the Treasury;

Sir Frederick Hoyer Millar, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office;

Sir Patrick Dean, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC);

Sir Richard Powell, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence;

Marshall of the RAF Sir William Dickson, Chief of the Defence Staff; Admiral Sir John Caspar, Vice Chief of the Naval Staff;

Marshal of the RAF Sir Dermot Boyle, Chief of the Air Staff;

Lt. Gen. Sir William Stratton, Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff;

Lord Plowden of the Atomic Energy Authority.

This was indeed an august gathering: their brief from the Prime Minister was to try and look ten years into the future and plan for the changes that they saw coming. In the words of Norman Brook, the Cabinet Secretary, ‘The purpose of the meeting is to put in hand a study of future policy… This study will be undertaken by officials – the Prime Minister does not wish other Ministers to be troubled with it at this stage.’6. There may well have been a subtext behind that last comment, perhaps along the lines that the Prime Minister wanted a relatively disinterested viewpoint for his future-gazing. The Civil Service and the military could also give a longer term view – they would still be there, implementing policy, long after the politicians had gone.

Their focus, as can be seen from the people present, was foreign policy and defence. A major issue at the time was the size of the Defence budget – indeed, the appointment of Sandys as Minister of Defence, and the resultant 1957 Defence White Paper, was intended as the first step in the rationalisation of defence spending. The intention was to keep defence expenditure at 7% of total Government spending, and indeed the deterrent was invoked as part of this. Nuclear deterrence could mean less money spent on conventional arms. In anticipation, the Air Staff had provided briefing papers on the various deterrent options for the assembly.

The deterrent at that time was being maintained by the V bombers, which would shortly be supplemented by Blue Steel. Soon bombers would be obsolete in the strategic role, and the only possible replacement available was Blue Streak. In the words (almost) of another Prime Minister, There Was No Alternative. Blue Streak might have been highly unpopular in Whitehall, but in the absence of a viable alternative it was either Blue Streak or no deterrent at all.

The RAF were not happy with the tone of the discussion when it came to deterrent policy:

It was obvious in the Working Group’s discussions that our sister services resent the overriding priority afforded the Deterrent (at present in RAF custody) under HMG’s policy, and are covetous of the money and resources assigned to it. They have endeavoured to cloak these base motives by advancing arguments of expediency in the guise of military and political rectitude.7

It has been said that the Services often spend more time fighting each other than fighting the enemy, and this is quite a good example of that maxim. That atmosphere of inter-Service enmity (particularly between the Navy and the RAF) should be borne in mind when watching how events unfolded.

‘Base motives’ or not, at the end of their deliberations the Working Group ‘invited the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence to consider further with the Secretary of the Cabinet the question of a separate inquiry into the means of delivery of the British contribution to the nuclear deterrent’8.

Sir Richard Powell was the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence at that time, and having been given this brief, he wrote to Sandys, then Minister, about setting up an inquiry. As we have seen, Sandys was not at all keen for any inquiry.

Other matters intervened with the General Election of October 1959. During the run-up to an election much of Government is put on hold: Ministers have other pre-occupations, and there is little point in going ahead with projects if a change of government means they will be reviewed. There is always a hiatus in Whitehall as the new ministers come in and are brought up to speed on their department.

General Elections also give Prime Ministers the opportunity to reshuffle their Cabinet, and this one was no exception. Sandys was replaced as Minister of Defence by Harold Watkinson, a career politician who had been a businessman and had no great ideological position as far as defence was concerned – he set out to be a practical man, who would bring a businesslike approach to the department rather than an ideological one. His obituary in ‘The Independent’ newspaper says of him that:

He was, already, a highly successful businessman and, like many before and after him (the late John Davies and today Sir James Goldsmith spring to mind), believed that businessmen could handle government far more efficiently and effectively than could politicians. He found out, however, that politics was an art of its own, and that the methods of man management that he had evolved for himself in business were ineffective when applied to the emotional, and often tortuous, handling of political affairs.9

Sandys himself was moved to a renamed Ministry of Supply – now the Ministry of Aviation – with the brief to ‘rationalise’ the aircraft industry. In many ways this can be seen as a demotion, or certainly a sideways move, given that he had been Minister of Supply in 1952 – so much so he asked Macmillan for assurances that his Cabinet seniority would not be affected.

It could be argued that Sandys had fulfilled his brief as Minister of Defence, and had taken his reforms as far as he could. His personal relations with some of the senior military figures had not always been good, and it was probably time for him to move on. Whether the ongoing Blue Streak saga was also a contributory factor is open to debate.

Sandys having gone, the way was clear to the setting up of the British Nuclear Deterrent (Study Group) or BND(SG) (known affectionately to the Admiralty in a later incarnation as the ‘Benders’, presumably from ‘BNDS’). On the face of it, the composition of the Study Group was impeccable:

Sir Richard Powell, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence;

Sir William Strath, Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Aviation;

Sir Frederick Brundrett, Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Defence;

Sir Patrick Dean of the Foreign Office and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee;

Mr. B. D. Fraser of the Treasury;

Vice-Admiral Durlacher, Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff;

Lt.-General Sir William Stratton, Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff; Air Marshal Sir Edmund Hudlestone, Vice-Chief of the Air Staff;

Sir William Cook of the Atomic Energy Authority.

This was a high-powered group of men, and any conclusion they arrived at would be buttressed by the authority of their rank. Needless to say, their deliberations would have to be extremely confidential, since any leak could have considerable consequences. Having said that, it is clear that the Ministry of Aviation seemed to be ‘out of the loop’, despite their Chief Scientist being a member of the Study Group. After the report had been issued, the CGWL, Sir Steuart Mitchell, complained that

Adequate opportunities did not occur during the drafting of their report by the Study Group for my Controllerate to brief you properly on the technical issues as they arose, nor to discuss with you the conclusions and recommendations of the report.

I write this to say that now that I have seen the report I am seriously disturbed at the picture it presents in so far as the technical issues are involved, and that I disagree with some of the conclusions.

I am having those technical aspects of the report which lie in my sphere examined (for the first time) in detail and will submit some comments on them to you in a few weeks’ time.

Comments such as these from the CGWL show that the BND(SG) must have been distinctly selective in whom it chose to consult. It also shows how well they were able to keep their discussions under wraps.

Sandys himself seems to have had no prior warning either. The Treasury was delaying the authorisation of funds for further development, and as late as 25 January 1960, he was writing:

Therefore, unless the Defence White Paper contains an announcement that Blue Streak is to be abandoned, which I regard as inconceivable, and which I would, of course, strongly resist, I must ask you to give the ‘all clear’ so that further serious delays can be avoided.10

The wording could, of course, be political disingenuousness, but it does not sound like the words of a man who has read the Study Group’s report – or at least

who has heard about their conclusions. The Chancellor, Derek Heathcote Amory, replied on 4 February:

I do not think it would be reasonable, at a time when the future of the weapon is the subject of a searching review as a major question of defence policy, to accept that the programme should suffer no delay… I am afraid therefore that I still feel unable to authorise the further expenditure referred to.11

He also cited a previous hold up of funds (the Prime Minister’s note of December 1958) as a precedent.

Another part of his letter caused one of the officials in the Ministry of Aviation to note:

The Chancellor is stretching things very far when he says that the possibility of the weapon coming into service late has been one of the considerations necessitating the current review. The Chancellor, having always disliked the Blue Streak policy, might indeed almost be thought to have done his best, by imposing financial restrictions, to ensure that he would be able to say that the weapon would be late and therefore not worth having but in fact it is only the complete hold up of fresh capital expenditure in the last four or five months that has caused us to wonder whether the little elbow room that we had in the R&D programme would no longer prove sufficient.

So who on the Study Group could be seen as opposed to Blue Streak? The position of the Services is interesting. Firstly, the Army would have no strong views on Blue Streak one way or other, except in terms of cost. Blue Streak would take up a relatively large proportion of the defence budget, money that could be used for conventional weapons. The positions of the RAF and Navy are more interesting.

Certainly, sections of the Navy, led by Mountbatten, were campaigning hard against Blue Streak and in favour of Polaris. A memo from Lord Selkirk, First Lord of the Admiralty, illustrates this quite clearly:

My aim last year was not only to make the Prime Minister, Minister of Defence, and other members of the Defence Committee aware of the potentialities of POLARIS, but also to check, so far as this was possible, the BLUE STREAK programme before it gathered momentum. We had some success. The decision at the turn of the year that BLUE STREAK should be allowed to proceed in 1959/60 was certainly accompanied by a growing realisation in the Defence Committee of its disadvantages and mounting costs.

Since then, however, BLUE STREAK has become more firmly established and it looks, at the moment as if the 1960/61 Estimates discussions this Autumn may strengthen it further. If this should be so, its formidable cost, as shown in the draft paper you attached, will become a most serious threat to our hopes of increasing the size of our conventional naval forces, even it the total defence vote were to be fairly substantially enlarged.

We must carefully consider our tactics for dealing with this. Whatever help we may get from the new CDS [Chief of Defence Staff, Mountbatten], I believe that we must be prepared to make the running ourselves.

As I see it, the Government is unlikely to go so far as to stop BLUE STREAK unless there is something which can be put in its place as the future British controlled contribution to the deterrent. From what you say, we are unlikely to be in a position this Autumn, even if we were asked to do so, to present for consideration a substitute programme for POLARIS submarines. What then can we do?12

And, of course, there the Navy hit the nail on the head. There was, at the time the Study Group began its deliberations, no single well-developed system that could be put in Blue Streak’s place. No British long-term possibility was even on the horizon, but there were possible American systems.

Polaris was showing great potential, but still had some way to go, and had other drawbacks, such as the need to build a fleet of atomic powered submarines from scratch. But during the few weeks that the Study Group deliberated, considerable progress was being made elsewhere on another missile – WS138A, or, as it would become better known, Skybolt.

Single stage. Launched 12 March 1959 at 20:20. Apogee 334 miles. No re-entry head.

BK03 was the second proving trial, and was successful except for an engine malfunction late in flight resulting in a long period of ‘cold’ thrusting (that is, decomposition of HTP in the absence of kerosene). The fault was subsequently traced to excessive heating of the propulsion bay, in which temperatures were measured during flight.

Control of the vehicle was satisfactory both during ‘hot’ burning and ‘cold’ burning. In this trial, the guidance telescope tracking was made the primary source of information and radar tracking was retained as the stand-by; this proved very successful. Very good tracking information was received until engine flameout, after which radar information was used during ‘cold’ burning.

Two stage. Launched 27 July 1965 at 03:30. Apogee 306.1 miles. Re-entry head: GW 20 coated with PTFE.

Shut down of the first stage occurred about 3% seconds early, and as a result it under-performed by about 700 ft/second. The head appeared to disintegrate on re-entry at a height of about 28,600 ft.

BK24

Two stage. Launched 29 September 1965 at 00:05. Apogee 376 miles. Re-entry head: GW 20 made of silica.

There was a misalignment of the radar beam (about 0.8°) tracking the vehicle which sent the vehicle further downrange than expected, but the second stage velocity increment was fortunately at 10° to the vertical, and uprange, which helped compensate for the error.

The head survived re-entry down to 100,000 ft, when flakes of silica were observed flaking off for several seconds before the break up at 45,000 ft. Only the transponder and the stainless steel base plate were recovered.

I have seen the Minister of Aviation’s minute to you of 16th July about military space.

I note that he does not believe that we shall be able to hold back over military space indefinitely. I must make it clear that I should find the utmost difficulty in agreeing to add to our programme what might well become yet another major defence role or commitment. I suggest we cannot start to build a vertical empire if our colleagues insist on our continuing to provide for the defence of a horizontal one. I am sure that, before we go any further, we need a cool appraisal of what our real military space requirements are, if any, and of the various ways in which they might be met, with full figures of probable costs and an analysis of the effect of such costs on the already horrible Costings. I understand that papers on all this are being prepared for the Defence Research Policy Committee and I hope that these, in particular that of the Ministry of Aviation, can be considered very soon.

These are examples of the Zeitgeist, the feeling that space and rocketry are not Britain’s concern, and more than that: that the UK does not have the resources to become involved, and that British projects will inevitably be inferior to American projects.

The apogee of enthusiasm for space in the UK was probably in 1964. This is the year when Black Knight had reached a total of more than 20 successful launches, when there were two successful Blue Streak launches, and when Black Arrow was given its go-ahead, being announced publicly at the Society of British Aircraft Companies (SBAC) dinner just before the 1964 election by the Minister of Aviation, Julian Amery. There was a feeling of optimism that ELDO might lead to a bright new future for Europe and for Woomera. Newspaper and magazine articles portrayed Woomera as a space port for the future. Even earlier in the 1950s, the hit BBC radio serial, Journey into Space, portrayed the launching of Commonwealth rockets to the Moon and to Mars from the Australian outback.

The last of the major aerospace projects were all initiated under Macmillan’s Conservative Government. The Wilson Government in 1965 cancelled the TSR 2 and other major military aircraft projects. Concorde and Europa survived because of their international dimension: the UK was treaty-bound to these projects, the Foreign Office fought for them, the Government did not want to seem anti­European, and, most importantly of all, because the way the treaties were written, not a great deal of money would have been saved by cancellation.

The same was not true of Black Arrow, but by comparison with the likes of Concorde or TSR 2, it was a fairly insignificant affair. Spending was put on hold, to be doled out in three monthly offerings. Needless to say, this budgetary regime, the consequence of any lack of decision one way or the other, had the effect of both delaying the programme and increasing the cost, by preventing any long-term planning or ordering of materials.

Returning to the theme of the Zeitgeist, it is interesting to look at the press view. There had been successes with the launches of Blue Streak in 1964 and 1965, and with the Black Knight launches. But the Black Knight programme had finished by 1964, and the ELDO launches were hardly good news, despite the fact that the Blue Streak stage had always performed as expected. There was always the Black Arrow programme, but this was deliberately (and by Treasury instruction) kept very low key at the outset. The R2 launch in September 1970 was a different matter. The failure drew widespread attention in the press.

The broadsheets kept their reporting quite factual, and there had obviously been some ‘spin’ from the Ministry of Aviation and from Farnborough. Almost all the papers refer to the ‘seventeen seconds that cost success’, obviously a reference to the drop in pressurisation. The tabloids were less forgiving.

Under the heading ‘Broken Arrow,’ the Daily Mail had the following to say:

One Christmas, as a child, we got a train set called Golden Arrow which was gleaming, expensive, bursting with concealed power – and didn’t work.

So we can understand the chagrin of the boffins who get a space set called Black Arrow which was gleaming, expensive and… etc.

The first all-British launch of a satellite to orbit Earth failed to lob into a space an object uncomfortably like a pawnbroker’s ball.

Its purpose, we are solemnly assured, was to tell us things we didn’t know about the upper atmosphere. To this end, the Black Arrow project has been costing us £3 million a year.

As the Americans are some years ahead of us in this sort of exploration, it is likely that we could get all the information we could possibly digest about the upper atmosphere simply by calling Washington at the cost of £1 per minute.

If, however, we insist in going it – albeit late – alone, we would do well to mark the fact that NASA’s budget is around £1,300 million a year. And even they are looking for European money to launch a recoverable, and therefore cheaper, space outfit.

Our dilemma lies somewhere between the facts that even £3 million a year is too much to pay for a damp squib, while it would cost us many times that amount to buy a share of the American Roman candle. Especially as they would want to light the blue touchpaper.

The worst part about the article is the tone of mockery. The Evening Standard, a few months later, under the headline ‘WHAT A JOKE’ was even more brutal:

The French laugh at it. The rest of Europe ignores it.

The Russians couldn’t care less. Most Americans don’t even know it exists.

It is run on a budget that makes a shoestring look like a hawser. It depends on out of date equipment, and its future is in doubt.

What is IT? The Black Arrow project.

Britain’s national space effort – the one intended to gain us admittance to the exclusive – and so far elusive – Space Club.

But Black Arrow is a joke… a joke on the British tax payer.

The article continues in this vein, but there is a more interesting passage at the end:

The first one went haywire and had to be destroyed seconds after launch.

The second performed perfectly, and the third, launched last September, failed to put a satellite into orbit and in so doing failed to gain Britain entry into the ‘Space Club’ …

Yet, ironically, the previous failures can be laid at the door of funds, or the lack of funds.

This shortage of cash has led, in turn, to a shortage of time. For although there is only one firing a year, time is still of the essence.

Particularly when the scientists involved have to use slide-rules rather than computers.

When you have to make do with second best electronic monitoring devices.

And when you have to resort to economies like using garage petrol pumps for measuring your rocket fuel.

For the truth of the matter is that where America uses dollars, France uses francs, and Japan uses yen, Britain falls back on good old ingenuity.

But it is fast becoming apparent that Space projects can’t live on ingenuity alone.

Both articles are, in different ways, making the same point. There is no such thing as a cut price space programme.

So much for the public perception of the British space effort. What was the Government’s attitude? They were, after all, the customer.

With the advent of the Wilson Government in 1964, the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) was set up as a counterbalance to the Treasury. One of its remits early in 1965 was to consider the UK space programme. To say that it was opposed to it in almost any form is no exaggeration. Thus one paper, when discussing the Small Satellite Launcher (Black Arrow) states: ‘There may possibly be a long term interest in TV transmission by satellite, but this is never likely to be economic.’ The first direct broadcast satellite was a Canadian satellite in 1972; nowadays, of course, Sky Television is ubiquitous. One of the problems with the Civil Service of the time, excellent though they may have been in many ways, is that they were not technically educated, nor had they any feeling for entrepreneurship. Even economists are seldom likely to spot the next future technology. This is re-inforced by a later paragraph in the paper:

… the fact remains that none of the applications of satellites at present even remotely in sight is likely to bring any economic return, either in terms of commercial profits to manufacturers, exploitation by HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] as operator, or, through international contracts, across the exchanges.

[This passage in the brief has been underlined and noted in the margin.]

One wonders how much consultation there had been with manufacturers, particularly those in the US. By 1964, two TELSTARs, two RELAYs, (medium orbit satellites) and two SYNCOMs (in geostationary orbit) had operated successfully in space. By the end of 1965, EARLY BIRD had provided 150 telephone ‘half-circuits’ and 80 hours of television service.

The paper then concluded: ‘This proposal [Black Arrow] should be resisted as strongly as possible. Either it should be killed right away or remitted back to lower-level …’

Another official in the same department as part of the same debate commented that competing with the US and USSR in space was ‘a wanton waste of resources’. With regard to ELDO,

… unless Europe is to go on indefinitely squandering more and more resources in a field without significant economic return, some country sometime has got to take the lead in calling a halt, even at the cost of seeming opposed to European co-operation.

Implicit in this statement was the notion that the UK should be that country. Then in 1965 came the first of the many disagreements in ELDO, followed later by the British reluctance to be further involved in the programme. It must have seemed odd to the remaining five members of the organisation to see the founder members, those who had pushed so hard for the organisation, to fall out in this fashion, and to lose enthusiasm for their own project.

A brief prepared for the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, by the DEA on ELDO noted: ‘. the ELDO programme in general and our own proposed satellite launcher and satellite development programme are of low economic priority and cannot be justified on economic grounds.’ And on the ELDO B launcher proposal: ‘. For much less money we could do more work than we do now in a field which is of direct concern to us and where we can make new technological contributions’. But these fields never seem to be specified in any of the documents.

So what proportion of the space budget was taken up by ELDO? A policy paper written in 1966 estimated that Britain would spend £20.65 million on space that year, of which ELDO’s share would be £13.5 million, or more than 65%. Black Arrow, on the other hand, would come to around £1.7 million – or 8%!

Was the space budget exorbitant? Another paper of the period gives these figures for the estimated expenditure on civil Research and Development for 1966-19672:

Take ELDO out of the space programme, and its fraction of research and development expenditure shrinks to around 2%!

All the documents disparage ELDO A (Europa) on the grounds of ‘obsolescence’. This is a half-truth. What, in this context, does obsolete mean? The purpose of a satellite launcher is to launch satellites, and ELDO A would be a very good medium-sized launcher in the 1960s. Technically, the US was moving forward into solid fuel boosters and liquid hydrogen, but essentially, the technology has changed hardly at all in the half century from the advent of Atlas and Blue Streak. Launchers have grown bigger, but the latest designs would be quite comprehensible to the pioneers of the 1930s. The problem was rather different: there was little European demand for a medium-sized satellite launcher. Given in addition its increased cost compared with US launchers, then demand would indeed appear to be minimal (although it would have been as effective or more effective than the Delta rocket used to launch the UK Skynet satellites – had it been available on time).

ELDO B was written off by the same officials as still being smaller than some US launchers (Titan III). They commented: ‘Even the advanced ELDO B launcher cannot be expected to be technically or financially competitive with American launchers’. This again misses the point, which is whether it would have been capable of launching the geosynchronous satellites for which there would be a market, and a market that exists today and is growing ever greater.

It is interesting to read Tony Benn’s (Minister of Technology, 1966-1970) summation of ELDO, published in the New Scientist magazine in February 1971:

… The foundation of ELDO was, in fact, the first offloading by Britain of a high technology budget that its own industrial weakness no longer permitted it to carry. France identified it as a chance to build an alternative space programme to the American one, and de Gaulle dreamed of carrying the French language and culture to French Africa and possibly even to Quebec. Germany saw it as a first foot back into rocketry which helped to compensate for the loss of Werner von Braun, and Italy as a place for her in the big league plus contracts for Fiat. For European ministers of science it offered new ways to win a national reputation that would be popular with a public for whom the technological unity of Europe was slowly beginning to be real, even if only through the televising of the European cup and the Eurovision Song Contest.

And further: ‘ELDO… suffered from the fatal defect of being a hardware system in search of an application which was in any way economic.’

The counter argument was put forward by the Ministry of Aviation that unless the UK or Europe had its own capability, the US would have had a monopoly. Without Ariane, and without the availability of Russian launchers from the early 1990s, that would have been true. It is also probable that despite the wishful thinking of civil servants, the US would have charged a very great deal for launching satellites that would have competed with its own in the lucrative communications market. Indeed, it could have charged almost what it wanted to, or alternatively have retained its monopoly in the communications satellite area.

Lest it should seem that all the preceding quotes have been taken out of context, or that the quotes have been carefully selected to provide a one-sided argument, it is well nigh impossible to find any quotes in favour of pushing forward any space programme outside the Ministry of Aviation and the Foreign Office – and indeed after around 1966 even the Ministry of Aviation, or Technology as it had become, accepted the demise of the British effort. The Foreign Office was not concerned with the technology at all – merely the political implications of withdrawal from present programmes with regard to Europe and Australia.

Be all that as it may, British withdrawal, painful though it was, took place. The British experience with ELDO bit deep: so much so that the UK has never again become involved with any launcher programme. Even the European Space Agency, ESA, was described by one minister in the 1980s, Kenneth Clark, as ‘an exclusive club designed principally to put a Frenchman into space’. Such wilful disparaging of one of the most commercially and scientifically successful space agencies is astonishing. The same minister also refused to fund the innovative British Hotol design, whilst at the same time declaring the engine design classified, and thus preventing development elsewhere.

Could commercial firms have carried on some of these projects? The companies involved in aerospace in 1971 were Hawker Siddeley Dynamics, successor to de Havilland, which itself had been swallowed up in British Aerospace, Rolls Royce and Saunders Roe, who by then were part of Westland (at this period they were working under the name of the British Hovercraft Corporation. Like too many of the Saunders Roe programmes, hovercraft seemed initially to have had a bright future but have turned out to be a dead end).

Saunders Roe, even as part of a larger organisation, were too small to be able to afford the capital investment needed for developing satellite launchers. Rolls Royce and British Aerospace could have worked together on further developments of Blue Streak, but this was only part of the problem.

As well as the rocket, launch sites are needed. Woomera was not suited to satellite launching, and, by this time, was near closure. Kourou, in French Guiana, did, however, have a Blue Streak launch pad. Ariane 1 was not launched until 1979; Ariane 4, which has been the mainstay of ArianeSpace, not until 1988. How prepared the French would have been to make the launch site available is, however, another question. In addition, NASA in its post-Apollo phase, was promoting the Shuttle very forcefully as the answer to satellite launching, with the re-usable nature of the craft. Indeed, it is arguable that part of the success of Ariane was the Challenger disaster of 1987, since by then NASA had almost halted its programme of satellites on conventional launchers.

However, Ariane was a more powerful launcher than all but the most sophisticated Blue Streak derivatives. Ariane 1 was optimised to put 1,750 kg into a Geo Transfer Orbit (GTO). A Blue Streak/Black Arrow combination, even supplemented with strap-on boosters or liquid hydrogen stages, would not have matched that performance. Ariane 4 and Ariane 5 are even more powerful.

But even if the three firms had joined forces to produce a launcher, who would have been their customers? The UK Government has launched some military communications satellites under the Skynet programme, but not on a scale large enough to justify such investment. The European Space Research Organisation (ESRO), ELDO’s sister organisation, and other European countries might have been customers, but the market in 1971 was still very thin.

There is also a further political dimension: the UK aircraft industry was not in good shape in the 1970s; indeed, it was nationalised by the Wilson Government

during that period. It was certainly in no position to undertake large speculative projects of this sort.

Woomera was, of course, the test range, jointly funded by the UK and Australia. It was run by the WRE (Weapons Research Establishment) based at nearby (relatively!) Salisbury, South Australia. The airfield at RAAF Edinburgh was used for the V bombers during Blue Steel trials and for transport generally. The Range was first established in 1947 under the Anglo-Australia Defence Project and the Woomera Prohibited Area (WPA) was declared for the purposes of ‘testing war materials’. It was sometimes referred to as the ‘Joint Project’. Most of the early work was devoted to surface-to-air missiles, which would result in the Bloodhound, Thunderbird and Sea Slug missiles. A Blue Streak launch site was built at Lake Hart, with the Black Knight launch sites not far away. Later, a Black Knight launch site was adapted for the Black Arrow satellite launcher.

Work began on a Blue Streak launch site set into the side on a canyon, with the intention of building a silo (‘underground launcher’) around it, but with the military cancellation this was abandoned.

High Down

This was the test site for Saunders Roe, where Black Knight and Black Arrow vehicles were taken for static firing before being taken out to Woomera for

launching. It was situated by the old Needles Battery, on the top of the chalk cliffs overlooking the Needles lighthouse.

Liquid hydrogen is usually regarded as the most effective fuel for rockets. (In this section, it may be assumed that liquid oxygen is the oxidant. Fluorine is better theoretically, but is very hazardous environmentally, if from no other point of view.) This is because it has a very high exhaust velocity, or looking at it another way, a very high S. I. Thus the HTP/kerosene combination used in Black Knight and Black Arrow has an exhaust velocity in vacuum of around 2,500 m/s, whereas a well-designed liquid hydrogen motor can achieve exhaust velocities of around 4,400 m/s.

Using the rocket equation vfinal = vexhaust x ln(mass ratio), a liquid hydrogen stage of the same mass ratio would achieve a final velocity around 75% greater. On the other hand, the structural penalties of using liquid hydrogen means that the mass ratio would be significantly lower than an equivalent HTP stage. There are complications to liquid hydrogen vehicle design.

The first is that it is extremely cold boiling at -253 °C (20 K), and the second is that it has a very low density – 70 kg/m3 as opposed to around 1,300 kg/m3 for HTP.

The very low temperature of the liquid means the tank has to be well insulated, not only on the ground, but also from the heating effect of air friction

during launch. Although effective insulation is

extremely light, this still adds weight to the vehicle. The low density means a large tank volume (almost 20 times that of HTP!), which again means extra weight.

Despite these drawbacks, liquid hydrogen is being used in an increasing number of vehicles, usually as an upper stage. The Ariane 5 central core uses liquid hydrogen, although it has the two large strap on solid fuel boosters to lift it to altitude. The Ariane 5 ECA (Evolution Cryotechnique type A) core has a burn time of 650 seconds.

RPE began work on hydrogen chambers in the late 1950s. At that time, they had no facilities for storing or producing liquid hydrogen, but instead used gaseous hydrogen pre-cooled by liquid nitrogen. A number of fully working Figure 13. A hydrogen/oxygen test chamber built chambers were built and fired at RPE Westcott. at Westcott (see Figure 14).

The larger chambers were capable of around 4,000 lb thrust: it would have been relatively easy to scale them up to, say, 8,000 lb, which would be well – suited to upper stages for Blue Streak, Black Knight, or Black Arrow. Such stages would have increased payloads very considerably. Whilst developing the chambers would not have been difficult, building a liquid hydrogen stage would have needed a considerable amount of development work and thus cost.

Based on this work, a variety of designs for launchers using Black Knight as the first stage were drawn up5. Some were pressure fed, others used turbopumps. Sketches of the designs can be seen below.

Calculations were carried out for a variety of configurations. Four different first stages were considered and three different second stages. A Cuckoo solid fuel motor was taken as third stage (calculations were also carried out for a two – stage version, without the Cuckoo motor, but only two of the combinations were able to put any payload into orbit at all). Payloads could no doubt be increased somewhat by a purpose-built third stage.

FIG. I GENERAL ARRANGEMENTS OF VEHICLES HAVING PUMP FED SECOND STAGE.

Figure 15. Various proposals for satellite launchers using Black Knight as the first stage and a liquid hydrogen/oxygen second stage.

Version 1 is the standard Black Knight, with a tank diameter of 3 ft and a sea – level thrust of 21,600 lb. Versions 2, 3 and 4 have a tank diameter of 4 ft 6 inches and sea-level thrusts of 25,000, 40,000 and 50,000 lb respectively. Version 3 would have a six chamber motor, and version 4 an eight chamber motor (effectively the first stage of Black Arrow). The lift-off weight was derived by assuming a thrust : mass ratio of 1.25.

Three variants of the second stage engine and propellant feed systems were examined:

(a) An engine having four chambers w ith turbo-pump feed of the propellants.

(b) An engine having four chambers with pressurised tank feed.

(c) A single chambered engine with pressurised tank feed.

Versions 1 and 2 are really non-starters. Versions 3 and 4 are, on the face of it, fairly promising. However, the first stage of version 4 is in effect Black Arrow. Developing Black Arrow, where the intention was to keep the cost down by using as much Black Knight technology as possible, stretched the budget. Developing a liquid hydrogen stage, which would have been technically challenging, would have been much more expensive, and, as can be seen, payloads were not very significant. Some improvement could have been achieved with solid fuel strap-on Raven boosters, but not enough to make the design worthwhile.

Another major proposal was for a liquid hydrogen third stage for the Blue Streak satellite launcher and the Anglo-French launcher proposal. Although the Saunders Roe brochure for Black Prince is sometimes taken as the ‘definitive’ version of the Blue Streak launcher, there was, in reality, no such thing. Black Prince shows an HTP third stage, but the RAE realised that a liquid hydrogen stage could increase the payload considerably, and in this period, it was looking at 6- or 12-hour orbits for communications satellites. It is interesting to see the emphasis that this stage is given in the initial brochure for the Anglo-French launcher.

Two quite comprehensive studies were carried out: one by the RPE and one by Saunders Roe. Both go into considerable detail, including detailed analysis of the thermal cladding that would be needed for the liquid hydrogen tank.

The RPE produced the report for its design in April 1961.6 One of the more unusual features of the report is that it seems to be the only one written in this period (other than some ELDO reports) which uses entirely metric units. This leads to some slightly awkward conversions. For example, the diameter of the fuel tanks is 1.37 m… or 54 inches! This was obviously designed as a third stage for a Blue Streak/Black Knight combination. Indeed, the RAE had calculated the optimum mass for a liquid hydrogen third stage for the Blue Streak launcher to
be 2,270 kg, and the stage was designed around this weight, although later calculations showed the optimum mass as 3,630 kg.

There would be four motors in the stage, each of which was intended to produce a thrust of 9 kN (2,000 lb) with a chamber pressure of 50 N/cm2 (5 bar or 75 psi). One design being considered was what might be described as self- pressurising: a pressure-fed system, with the gases being used to pressurise the tanks coming from the fuel itself via a heat exchanger. The tank pressures could be relatively low given the low chamber pressure – 80 N/cm2 (8 bar or 90 psi)

was the value being considered. This is quite an elegant solution, dispensing with the weight and complexity of a turbopump, yet avoiding the weight penalties of thicker tank walls and heavy gas bottles. The only drawback is that with the relatively low thrust, the burn time will be quite prolonged, which means carrying the unburned fuel up the Earth’s gravitational potential well as the vehicle gains in height.

The specification for the BSSLV third stage investigated by Saunders Roe required a motor which had:

(a) A thrust of between 3000lb and 4000lb (in vacuo) lasting for about 15 to 20 minutes.

(b) A thrust of between 40lb and 60lb (in vacuo) lasting for about 2Vi to 3Vi hours.

Communication satellites need to be in as high an orbit as possible, and the new vehicle could have put an appreciable payload in an orbit around 8,000 miles high. The usual method of doing this is the apogee motor, as discussed before. Bristol Siddeley came up with a design for a motor which used a motor with two large chambers and two small chambers. The large chambers would take the vehicle up to orbital height, but the small chambers would then be used to raise the orbit, with a

burn time of two or three hours.

To power such low thrust chambers with a pump was impractical. Pressurising the tanks usually meant carrying large and heavy gas bottles. Instead, the proposal was to use a heat exchanger to produce ‘hot’ (relative in this context) hydrogen gas. The gas could then be used to pressurise the tanks (a further heat exchanger would be needed for the liquid oxygen tank).

Rocket chambers are usually at quite high pressures – perhaps 40 times atmospheric pressure. At sea level, the escaping gases are opposed by atmospheric pressure, and higher chamber pressures make the motor more efficient. In the vacuum of space this does not apply. Chambers can be run at quite low pressures, and it was suggested in this case that a chamber pressure of only one atmosphere might well be feasible. This avoids the complication of pumps and the weight of gas bottles.

On the other hand, pumps are needed for the earlier boost phase, and unless they are discarded (which they were not), the vehicle is carrying unnecessary weight during the long cruise phase.

Bristol Siddeley had not done any work on liquid hydrogen motors up to now, and this proposal was marked in the Ministry of Supply file with a hand written comment:

Downey thinks we would be nuts to bring yet another firm into the space business.7

Downey was one of the senior officials in the Ministry of Aviation – the criticism is slightly unfair since Bristol Siddeley were already producing the Gamma motors for Black Knight.

Saunders Roe were given the task of designing the tank structure, and produced a substantial brochure8. In conjunction with RAE and Bristol Siddeley Engines, the parameters for the design were set:

7.0 lb approximately

5.0 lb approximately 400 lb. sec/lb

Two thrust phases:

(1) Boost: 3,500 lb for 8 minutes

(2) Cruise: 44 lb for 2 hours

It was estimated that such a design could put 900 lb in a 5,000 mile circular orbit or 600 lb into a 9,000 mile orbit.

In many ways this is an interesting idea, but on closer inspection has as many drawbacks as advantages. During the cruise phase, the large chambers and their plumbing are still attached to the vehicle, but as dead weight. Jettisoning them would make the proposal much more efficient but would not be easy. Secondly, a ‘slow burn’ is less efficient from a different point of view: as the vehicle climbs the gravity well as it moves further from the Earth, then it is taking unused fuel with it. From a gravitational potential energy point of view, it is better to expend the fuel in one big burst at the start of the orbit transfer – this does the opposite!

In the end, of course, all of this became moot. The third stage of Europa was to be developed by Germany, and the design chosen was very different. As a consequence of the ELDO B proposals put forward by the French in 1964, contracts were awarded for research into liquid hydrogen motors. Rolls Royce was one of the firms involved, and building on the work done at the RPE, began the design and testing of a motor called the RZ 20. The contract was shared with the French firm of SEPR (Societe d’Etudes pour la Propulsion par Reaction). Rolls Royce was to produce the thrust chamber part of the motor, with SEPR providing the turbopump assembly.

Val Cleaver, Chief Engineer of the Rocket department at Rolls Royce, wrote to the Ministry of Technology asking whether he could build the test stand at Spadeadam, which was a Ministry establishment, but being run as an agency by Rolls Royce.

JEP Dunning, Director of the RPE, protested that the test site should be built at Westcott, which already had extensive facilities for testing and firing liquid hydrogen chambers, although none of them had been as powerful as the proposed Rolls Royce chamber, seen below being test fired at Spadeadam (Figure 19). Cleaver pointed out that Rolls Royce were building the facility as a private venture. As he put it in a letter to the Ministry of Technology:

It was not possible for ELDO to commit any money for the necessary test facilities for these chambers. Therefore (and not without some difficulty, as you can probably imagine) I persuaded our Main Board to sanction the cost of a modest test cell for the purpose, as a P. V. Extension to the Components Test Area at Spadeadam.9

He went on to say:

We are most anxious to have the test facility at Spadeadam, for two very definite reasons:-

(a) Because if any larger operational programmes for hydrogen rocketry ever arise in the UK, it will be inevitable that their testing should be done at Spadeadam. It is highly desirable, therefore, to begin as we mean to go on, and start gaining early experience there as soon as possible.

(b) Because the team at Spadeadam desperately need some injection of new work, to raise morale and inspire some confidence in the future of the establishment (I am sure I do not need to emphasise to you the problems of this sort we have had since 1959, with the 1960 military cancellation and all ELDO’s subsequent ups and downs.)

Given that it was a private venture, the costs were substantial: £54,000 for the construction costs, £15,000 for two liquid hydrogen road trailers, and £5,000 for the chamber itself, making a total of £74,000 (a contingency figure of approximately 10% was added to the estimate to bring it up to £81,000).

In the end, two firings, each of ten seconds duration, were achieved before the programme ran out of money. The total cost of the programme was £250,000.