Could the UK Once Again Become Involved in a Launcher Programme?

In a word, no. There are many reasons for this.

Firstly, there is no infrastructure left. After the Black Arrow cancellation, the facilities at Cowes, at High Down and at Ansty were closed down. With the demise of ELDO, the Rolls Royce facilities were closed, and Spadeadam handed over to the RAF. There was still some work going on with the Falstaff programme designed to assist the Chevaline upgrade to the Polaris system (Chevaline itself also required some rocketry development). Some facilities were kept available until the mid-1990s as a ‘strategic asset’, but even those have gone. A little development work continues at Westcott related to satellite work.

Building new infrastructure would be very difficult. Gone are the days when redundant War Office sites or disused airfield could be pressed into service. The idea of building a rocket test facility at somewhere like High Down is laughable in today’s Britain.

Secondly, the skills have gone. Whilst there may well be plenty of competent engineers available, none will have worked on rocketry systems. Such systems have their own peculiarities. If you have worked on them in the past, you are aware of the pitfalls to be avoided. This is sometimes described as ‘tacit knowledge’ – knowledge you have gained by experience, but which is very difficult to describe. But all those who worked on Blue Streak or Black Knight or Black Arrow have long since retired, and newcomers would have to learn many lessons which once were well known, but that knowledge has gone with the engineers of the past.

Thirdly, there is money. Rocketry demands a lot of money. The folk memory of the Treasury is long, and the experience of ELDO is burned into the collective subconscious of Whitehall. Never mind that it was the Government’s fault in the first place – the money wasted serves as a stark reminder to anyone trying to resurrect the programmes.

On the other hand, space is not all about rockets. Rockets are but a means to an end, and that end is to launch satellites. Part of what is left of de Havilland’s site at Stevenage has, by a long and tortuous path, ended as part of EADS Astrium, and still manufactures satellites, as does another site at Portsmouth, which in 2011 employed 1,400 people. Similarly, Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL) is an example of what the Treasury was talking about when it insisted that if space was a profitable business, then private business should get on and do it.

What was left of the Ministry of Aviation became subsumed into the Ministry of Technology, then the Department of Trade and Industry. Now there is a new UK Space Agency, created in April 2010, replacing the British National Space Centre (BNSC) which was an umbrella organisation of ten Government departments, research councils and non-departmental public bodies. The UK civil space programme budget was at that time in the order of £270 million per year – about 76% of which is the UK’s contribution to ESA projects.

There may have been relief in the Treasury and in the Government when the programmes were finally cancelled, but there was a great deal of bitterness among those who had worked on the projects. Let them have the last word: they built rockets with a success rate almost second to none on shoe string resources, and then retired into obscurity. [19]