The ‘Might Have Beens’

In any field like aerospace, there will always be projects on the drawing board which never make it through to hardware. Sometimes this is because they are simply bad designs, or sometimes because their rationale has disappeared. Quite often there is simply not the money for them. Thus, although the UK had the technical ability to produce an excellent large satellite launcher, it did not do so because it did not perceive a need for satellites at all, neither did it have the money to pay for them.

The historian must also be wary of the glossy brochures which are produced by the aerospace companies. Some are simply not technically feasible. One artist’s impression in a BAC brochure had four Blue Steel missiles mounted under the wing of Concorde. Quite what the four missiles would do for the aerodynamics of the aircraft was not mentioned. Other brochures simply do not take into account political realities – whilst the Blue Streak/Centaur proposal was technically very interesting, it would have been a purely British design and would have needed an equatorial launch site. The prospect of the French agreeing to allow the British to use Kourou for their own benefit was remote.

There are other possible pitfalls for potential historians, particularly in regard to oral histories. People who worked on projects years ago might say, ‘I remember a study being done on…’ without necessarily remembering why the study was being carried out, the outcome of the study, or, if it was rejected, why it was rejected. Similarly, there are many ‘back of the envelope’ ideas which never see the light of day, and rightly so.

Many of the engineers working on the projects at the time were not able to see the wider policy picture. This is partly because much of the work was secret and heavily compartmentalised, partly because commercial firms were not privy to the workings of government, and partly because engineers are sometimes prone to the mentality that because a thing can be done, it should be done. There is sometimes the feeling among them, unspoken, inchoate, but nevertheless real, that ‘our toys were taken away’. What were the wider policy issues?

The UK undoubtedly had the capacity to develop large satellite launchers, and the saga related in this book is frustrating for the enthusiast because the drawings could have been converted to reality with two extra ingredients: money, and the will to go ahead. In the end, the projects did not go forward mainly because the governments of the time did not think them a worthwhile use of money and resources, and in hindsight, that decision can be argued to be the correct one.

First of all, what do you want a satellite launcher for? To launch satellites. Why do you want to launch satellites? Nowadays, that seems obvious, with telecommunications satellites and satellite TV and so on. But it was not obvious in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Interestingly, one of the very first UK studies on the possibilities of satellites was done as early as 1955, looking at their suitability for reconnaissance. In the 1950s much covert reconnaissance of Russia was being carried out by Britain and America using spy planes like the U2, or the high-altitude Canberra, partly because maps of the USSR were so poor. If you wanted to target a missile complex you had to know where it was and whether it even existed. Indeed, the Americans were to launch a vast number of reconnaissance satellites: there were 145 such launch attempts between February 1959 and May 1972. (This military involvement also makes launching other satellites very much cheaper: the launch facilities and radar tracking stations are already there, and the economies of scale are very considerable.) Information exchange between Britain and the US meant that the British requirement disappeared, although it was to surface much later in the 1980s as the proposed Zircon satellite, designed for signals intelligence.

Many other projects initiated by the US, although seemingly innocent, also had military origins. Next in usefulness were navigation satellites, forerunners of the ubiquitous GPS system so useful to yachtsmen and motorists. These had the Polaris submarines in mind: how does a submerged submarine know its position accurately enough to launch missiles? Raising an antenna to pick up a satellite is one answer.

Communication satellites were not taken seriously until the early 1960s. A paper prepared by the Post Office around December 1959 comes out against geosynchronous satellites as famously described by Arthur C. Clarke in 1945. They were considered too far in the future even for the US, and that the quarter second delay was too much for telephony – the users would not care for it.

A long Ministry of Aviation paper in April 1959 considered the uses then foreseen. First of all, it was reckoned that a Blue Streak/Black Knight launch vehicle and five satellites would cost at least £10 million to develop (would that were so!). This could not be justified on the Defence Budget because the foreseeable direct benefits were slender. Then it considered the various possible uses for satellites, including reconnaissance, communications, meteorology and navigation. The report noted that American claims that a manned satellite has important military value were difficult to appreciate on any reasonable time scale, and refers to them as belonging to a ‘futuristic space platform age’. (In that respect they were right: no military uses for manned space stations have been found.) Weapons delivery posed severe technical problems on accuracy of delivery, reliability and security, and would raise serious political problems.

So although the report goes through the possibilities quite thoroughly, as with all these studies, the enthusiasm is lukewarm. Certainly, as time went by, defence interest in satellites, apart from communications, resulting in the Skynet satellites launched by the US, decreased steadily. Commercial applications were not even considered at this early stage.

The first transatlantic communications satellite was Telstar: launched by NASA aboard a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral in 1962, it was the first privately sponsored space launch. Telstar was placed in an elliptical orbit with a period of 2 hours 37 minutes, but its availability for transatlantic signals was limited to 20 minutes in each orbit that passed over the Atlantic Ocean (which not all of them would). Unlike geostationary satellites, the transmitting and receiving dishes had to be steered continuously to track the satellite.

In 1962, a Commonwealth Conference on Communications Satellites was held in London. This might be looked upon as the last gasp of the old Imperial ideal, attempting to link the countries of the Commonwealth (still consisting, in the main, of the old ‘white’ Commonwealth). Much talk was made of the Black Prince concept, although the conference showed up one of the major weaknesses of Black Prince and Europa: whilst too big and expensive for the likes of scientific satellites, they were crucially that bit too small to put any appreciable payload in a geosynchronous orbit. Ingenious attempts were made to suggest elliptical 12-hour or 8-hour orbits, but these were at best an inadequate solution. Other papers and conferences suggested that such a system could be profitable, but even so, this was not sufficient incentive to produce a launcher that would be adequate.

The scientific community wanted to launch satellites for space research, but the UK science budget was already stretched, and whilst it might support a few research satellites, it certainly could not support a launcher programme. Even the number of purely British scientific satellites launched on American launchers is very small.

There was a final category of satellite put forward by RAE in the 1960s – the small technological satellite. These would be small and low cost, but would test out systems for more ambitious projects. This is quite a reasonable concept – putting a variety of new technologies in one satellite has obvious weaknesses – but even these were growing too large for Black Arrow. And the Treasury’s response? If these technologies need developing, then let commercial enterprises develop them.

One new idea, and one that has not yet been fully exploited, is the ion motor. In theory, this has an enormous S. I. Atoms are stripped of an electron and the resultant ions are then accelerated through a very high voltage. This has the potential to produce enormous exhaust velocities, the power necessary being provided electrically from solar cells. The X5 satellite was intended to test this concept. Its motor would accelerate the ions through 25 kV, with a beam current of 25 mA, which would need 625W of power. The resultant thrust was only 0.015 N, but a small thrust over a very long period of time would have the same effect as a large thrust for a short time.

But assuming that the policy makers in the UK decided that they did want to launch satellites for whatever purpose, what were the designs that could have pressed into service to launch them? The projects below are not arranged in any great order of significance, but rather the intention is to take a somewhat meandering walk through the ‘might have beens’ in terms of launcher design.