The UK was so broke in the 1970s they could barely keep their military budget up, most importantly an independent nuclear deterrent. Superpower status was a thing of the past. With Brexit coming up its insightful to read up on post WW2 British history and how it got itself into the EU.
Sadly, Brexit will bring some cuts to UK research. And to projects like EUROATOM, where UK is a major contributor and host. It seems we haven't learned much from history.
Britain's first attempt to get into the EU was vetoed by de Gaulle; a strange was of repaying the UK's effort in getting France a permanent seat on the UN security council in 1945.
Twice in fact, in 63 and 67. His motivations, which he explained at length in a press conference that’s easy to find online were that the U.K. was only interested in a strictly limited free trade union, and wanted an extremely bespoke deal, excluding farming etc.
That never really changed, although Britain eventually gave up most of these conditions, when they finally joined.
I'm pretty sure De Gaulle was a time traveller, because a lot of calls he made were that way; "okayish" when they were made but jump 20 years forward and suddenly it's clear as day.
Sadly he was maybe a little too good at it, because now my country is frozen in an incessant quest to find a new De Gaulle; we can't accept the idea that politician - even president - are flawed and make mistakes, so we call all of them "bad", "wrong choice", ... That's why our president always have rock bottom public opinion.
Just shows that the leaders of war-time should retire after the peace treaty. Britain elected Labour right after the war and though rationing kept going for quite a while, the peace-time government created such brilliant things like the NHS.
Would you please not post ideological battle comments to HN? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The problem isn't your views, it's that this sort of thing leads to flamewars that take over discussion completely if we let it.
The idea on HN is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
The Isle of Wight test facility is free to visit, it's worth a look if you're in the area. There isn't a massive amount left - just the concrete structure and a lot of rabbits grazing the cliffs below.
However, there's enough left to make you slightly sad that the space race didn't end up in colonisation (yet). There are also a bunch of other features within less than a mile (an old military battery, The Needles, great views over The Solent, the colored sands of Alum Bay). Definitely underrated.
I was at the New Battery [0] in 2014 and they had tried to recreate the control room in the bunker with panels and equipment and figures made out of corrugated brown cardboard, which seemed terribly low budget and yet somehow quite appropriate to the setting.
I've been to the batteries and I have absolutely no recollection of hearing of this bit of history. Perhaps I was too taken in by the landscape. Underrated indeed, a second visit is in order!
Agreed, its a good place to explore! I live on the Isle of Wight, its full of interesting historical places. I'd like to discover the Nuclear bunker but yet to find it!
I used to actually work in radar on the Isle of Wight, lots of people think of it as simply a place for tourists and old people. However, at least to recently, its the home of a lot of the worlds greatest radar and antenna designers. Sadly its all in decline now.
Considering the fact that UK is a rather largeish (4th largest) contributor to ESA (which operates Arianne programme and several other scientific programs), does it make sense to say they "abandoned it"?
It seems more like they pooled resources with other European countries to make a meaningful space programme.
Except we're not - it says it right there in the article you linked, trying to suggest otherwise.. "But Britain will likely stay in the ESA, which is autonomous from the European Union."
A lot of us aren't particularly happy about Brexit, but please don't dilute the issue with flustered misinformation.
But not on the same terms: it is questionable if access to Galileo for example will continue, and if it does, what kind of access level the UK will have.
As a EU citizen, I worry that a fierce competitor (and in some aspects a potential foe) is going to be (mis-?) using EU infrastructure.
Why would the EU choose to be put at a disadvantage by giving the UK more negotiating tokens? We have seen that the UK tries to advance negotiations in some areas by using leverage from other areas. Which is fine, it is part of the game. Let's just avoid falling into more traps.
The underlying problem is that of trust: trust is not the right tool to build international relationships: independent institutions must be there to arbitrate whenever disputes arise. But the UK refuses to be held to account. It is thus an unreliable partner.
> But the UK refuses to be held to account. It is thus an unreliable partner.
Really? Crikey, I had no idea paranoia ran so deep on the European side[1]. Would you care to expand on why Britain apparently refuses to be held to account? As far as I'm aware, Britain is one of the most compliant members of the EU ruleset - aside from our much mentioned and ascribed financial concessions[2], our government doesn't tend to bend the rules to its own whims, as is often the case in France, Spain and Germany (re: abuse of subsidies and stature to corporate behemoths to go on spending sprees on infrastructure concerns in other EU states, in energy and construction in particular).
Galileo is a seperate concern - an EU project whose delivery will be overseen by ESA - and I appreciate the use of it as a pawn in the Brexit negotiations. However, that does somewhat fly in the face of the FrancoAnglo drive towards military cooperation anad partnership, which given the spend and reach of the two largest military EU nations, would make sense to not toy with too much.
To then go further and view the UK as a foe, whereas prior it was seen as a jigsaw-fit partner (we don't have any launch capability or ambitions to do so otherwise) seems .. well, as I said - paranoid.
Brexit's division is not so much divisory as putting a foot down. It's a sentiment shared across Europe, and not acknowledging that is dangerous, I think.
Anyway, love from the UK - we're not out to get you - I think we're just keeping trying to keep our options open.
[1] I don't for a minute think it does - my partner and most of my friends are European and this whole Brexit mess is a frequent topic of conversation. Your stance here is the first I've come across that draws things in such stark, 'cold war' terms. I wonder if you hold the same opinion of the classes in France, Italy and Germany who are as equally unkeen on the European government? Is Britain somehow a deserving outlier of this mode of thinking?
[2] mostly in regard to CAP spending, which now even Macron is beginning to appreciate the damage it causes
As a member (one would assume a "remain" country), the UK has been getting the best deal of the lot, and has been complaining for over 40 years, asking more and more. It has consistently used the EU as escape goat. Not particularly fair.
As a future partner (a "brexit" country, which is a completely different beast, since it will be one can assume steered by brexiteers, with a position towards the EU between animosity and hatred), the signals coming from the UK are very worrying. From the top of my head, some things I have been reading lately (mainly in the Telegraph, I do not bother with the Daily Mail or The Sun, which are probably much worse):
- the UK will undercut the EU in taxes
- the UK will leverage its financial prowess to extract concessions from the EU
- intelligence capabilities will be used to further put pressure on the EU
And many, many more.
Regarding the willingness of be held to account: the UK refuses to let the ECJ be the arbitrer of future disputes. What does this mean? Either there must be no arbitrer (so not held to account), or we need a new arbitrer (why more red tape?)
As every country should. I guess it's down to a difference in philosophy - we've long been a nation of shopkeepers, after all. Much like the Dutch. There's little new here, other than a hesitation to subsidise the French. These are ancient games and I'm sure a root of De Gaulle's reticence about the UK's joining. As I said, from my perspective, I see that at worst the UK plays by the rules, but lobbies for those rules to work in its favour, rather than simply ignoring them when it suits.
> Telegraph
aka, 'Torygraph', a right wing broadsheet with questionable interests and a fully-Brexiteering vehicle. I follow it too, but only to see what those at the periphery are thinking. For balance, check The Guardian or [Russian-owned and ever deteriorating] Independent for a completely different perspective of thought from within the UK. I'm sure there are equivalent publications in other European nations.
> the UK will undercut the EU in taxes
As Ireland or - good Lord, Luxembourg do now? As France intends?
> the UK will leverage its financial prowess to extract concessions from the EU
You mean the threat for 'tit for tat' measures against the EU if it continues to threaten The City with hard-line against Euro Clearing? Hardly surprising when the EU is the only principal reserve currency suddenly insisting that its clearing be done 'in-house', apparently with the sole intention of clawing some banking onto the continent.
> intelligence capabilities will be used to further put pressure on the EU
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but I hardly see the French and German intelligence agencies as being any less capable or unscrupulous. Here in Blighty we're just more public-facing about capability and intent. Getting back to Galileo for a second, it was the UK's role in Galileo to provide some of the more complex cryptographic aspects of the system - I find it odd how a country can go from trusted partner to polar opposite based on a flawed referendum by its people.
It is tiring to hear continuously what an exceptional country the UK is. We are all exceptional, but we all abide by the same rules. That's kind of the point of having a union.
> The Guardian or [Russian-owned and ever deteriorating] Independent
I read both too. I didn't know The Independent was Russian owned, but little matters. It seems a bit populist, but more balanced than the Telegraph. I find the Telegraph interesting because it is the Government's paper (/s), it seems to reflect the views of a big chunk of the British population, and because it is so extremely one-sided that it seems incredible that this is what nowadays passes by mainstream opinion (and by serious journalism) in the UK. The Guardian seems very balanced (boring?).
> As Ireland or - good Lord, Luxembourg do now? As France intends?
Sure. And if they cross a line, we have EU institutions to correct the situation. That is the point of being under the ECJ. The EU is not a "I blindly trust you" organization: it is a "you'd better stick to the agreements, otherwise you'll get into trouble: look, you signed here". This is how to build a community.
Ireland, for example, has been fined for its tax practices (Apple).
And you are overlooking a very important aspect: one thing is to have Ireland or Luxembourg offering discounted tax rates (which is already a problem, as we can see with all the tech companies being in those countries). But Ireland is nearly a tenth and Luxembourg a twentieth of the UK's size, in GDP terms ([1]). The UK being a tax heaven is a huge problem for the EU.
> Hardly surprising when the EU is the only principal reserve currency suddenly insisting that its clearing be done 'in-house', apparently with the sole intention of clawing some banking onto the continent.
The EU is also the only economic area without clearing being done in its territory, post-Brexit. It is a huge risk. If the only way to balance the situation is going against the interests of a third party, so be it. The EU does not concern itself anymore with the interests of the UK, in so far as those interests are not related to EU's interests.
> I'm not sure what you mean by this
I mean the repeated threats by the UK about withholding intelligence from the EU if other matters (trade deal) are not agreed.
The UK agreed to international-treaty level this year that it will do nothing under any circumstances which necessitate the reintroduction of an Irish border, not least because that would collapse the Good Friday Agreements.
Two weeks ago Theresa May tore it up.
Yes, the UK is an "unreliable partner". In its current regime of rule by imbeciles, there is no point negotiating with it nor coming to agreements with it, because the UK cannot be trusted to actually hold to those agreements from one month to the next.
It's quite hard to work out what the UK government is intending to do at all. There's no unity within the government about what the priorities for negotiation are and there's been basically no proposals which have stood up for any length of time. (This was the biggest problem with the referendum: 'leave' encompassed a huge variety of possible options with very different outcomes, and it seems each leave voter was imagining their own version of this. I believe even if there was no change in any voters opinions there is no specific plan which would be preferred by the majority over remaining in the EU).
That was sort of the underlying point of my response here - I think we can agree that a worst-case scenario (to the British government, anyway) would be the creation of a hard border in Ireland..
..the problem is that everything peripheral to that is a mess worthy of a drunken juggler. There's just too much conflicting to make any sense until 'something' is agreed.
My personal suspicions (read: hopes) these last few months are apparently shared by Lord Owen (who does not hope) - namely that the apparent levels of shambolic disorganisation are actually a ploy to create such a mess that as much of the fallout from Brexit can be mitigated.
I'd not be entirely surprised if the thing's drawn out another year or so and then somehow the entire enterprise is swep under the carpet and the UK tucks its tail between its legs and settles back where it should've never left in the first place.
Bear in mind, there's no actual precedence for any of this - I believe if there was any way of getting the UK to stay, somehow, without excess compromise for the EU, 'rules would be broken' because.. well, there aren't any.
I find your usage of the wording “potential foe” to be fascinating. How would the UK ever hope or want to have a militant-aggressive stance against the rest of EU, in the age of nuclear tipped ICBMs, NATO, and list of actors ever ready to step into such a rift and cause chaos?
I mean, that doesn’t stop India & Pakistan to be dancing on that edge, so I guess there’s that. But really interesting that this possibility is even on anyone’s mind though.
I don't think we are part of the ESA. I think the CSA and the ESA have a close partnership. We work closely on monitoring satellites and ISS. I'm unable to find details, but here's a press release.
The UK does have a remarkable habit of abandoning its lead in advanced technologies for rather short-sighted reasons. Nuclear power and high-speed rail, among others.
Same thing is playing out at present with wave power.
The Treasury is the usual suspect here, but there's a systematic lack of vision at high level in both the state and private sectors. Engineering doesn't get the same respect as making a fortune from land ownership.
My experience of growing up and joining tech startups in the UK in the 90s was fight against a prevailing culture of mediocrity, tall poppy syndrome, and snobbery; as though the practice of running a business and thereby making a real difference was a grubby low to which the high minded should not stoop. I was able to find like-minded people - usually those that’d travelled the world, and a high proportion of internationals - but we felt like a resented minority. This was often in stark contrast to the established expectation of academic excellence, where the UK has a long continuing history.
To be fair, wave power is looking awfully expensive when compared to wind power...
Not quite sure why, since nearly every wave power device is just a carefully shaped bit of concrete dropped into the sea and some generators.
I could make you a 500 watt wave power device in an afternoon and $500 in materials (big plastic oil drum as an air reservoir, big concrete weight, hobby jet engine expander as the air to electricity convertor), and within a year it would have paid for it's materials cost (at wind subsidy rates).
(I'm excluding the cost of a power interconnect to land here, but the cost of these scales favourably, so ends up not being a big fraction of the project cost for big projects).
Yet somehow commercial projects seem to have decades of payback time even when given significant electricity subsidies.
Would the plastic oil drum solution even last a year? A big problem with these things is that the sea is a corrosive fluid with a lot of kinetic energy in it, and it tends to destroy things.
Concrete usage seems to be a major cost predictor for anything that is not construction. That's probably because if you need a lot of concrete it's because whatever you create will face a lot of stress (thus more and more expensive material and shorter life).
The comparison with wind is not strictly relevant, since the UK is basically abandoning that too - in favour of nuclear, an industry that pays better kickback for the politicians making decisions.
Black Arrow's engines had a very remarkable design. For booster stages on space rockets you really need some sort of pump to get a high enough chamber pressure. Most rockets due this by burning some of the fuel and oxidizer in a turbine, wasting a bit of fuel. What Black Arrow did was use the decomposition of the high test peroxide to power the pump and then putting all of the result into the combustion chamber. Sort of like a staged combustion engine but developed much earlier. You'll always have worse efficiency with peroxide than with liquid oxygen but it was some very clever engineering.
That’s not quite the full story tho’. Where’s the bit about NASA is promising to launch British payloads at a huge discount then reneging the instant Black Arrow was cancelled? That’s why the Treasury was fooled into not supporting it.
It also explains why the UK abandoned their spaceflight program, but the French pushed for a joint European program which could rival the American and Soviet ones instead of piggybacking on them. 60s~70s France was very much against depending on either the US or the USSR, and they kept up Diamant launches until Ariane I started looking like it was happening (though it would still be 4 years until its maiden flight).
That was far from the only thing that led to its cancellation; another was that there simply wasn't a need to launch enough to prove the launch vehicle. FWIW, the report that led to its cancellation was written by William Penney, who had led the British nuclear programme.
Here’s the funny thing tho’ we can contrast AI with nuclear fusion. No one questioned that fusion would be a decades-long effort. Now in the present day AI is starting to pay off big time, and fusion is as far out of reach as ever. One had its funding slashed, the other didn’t. If it wasn’t a bungle it was remarkably short-sighted.
It just infuriates me how much U.K. engineers could accomplish if we weren’t fighting with our own government bureaucracies the whole time and could concentrate on the work
If someone else had been given Beeching's job (make British Rail stop losing money, hand-over-fist), what would they have recommended instead of mass closures? While they might have differed in what they suggested closing, I don't think the outcome would've been all that different.
They could have kept the land the routes ran over though.
One of the reasons Beaching gets so much blame is that not only did he close lines he sold parts of them off for little return so that they couldn’t be reopened without compulsory purchase orders because they've been built on.
Today we could massively improve our transport infrastructure if that hadn’t happened.
I've actually never heard that bit. Is there a link?
But the US was hardly the only player in the game. This was 1971, the technology side of the space race was winding down, and ESA/Ariane launch capability was right around the corner. I don't think "British" satellites really suffered much in the market for this decision in hindsight.
OTOH the UK had left ELDO to focus on Black Arrow (hence the replacement of the old Blue Streak stage by Diamant's, and possibly the move from Woomera to Kourou)
A bit like Canada's Avro Arrow... state-of-the-art jet fighter that put 15,000 ppl out of work when it got shelved (10 years before this happened in England).
The UK's equivalent was probably the cancellation of the TSR 2 [1] that nearly put BAC (predecessor to the current BAE Systems 800lb gorilla) out of business, with the same argument as for the Avro Arrow that manned aircraft wouldn't be needed soon because computers and missiles would make them obsolete (c.f. drones more recently).
They destroyed the tooling and already built prototypes as fast as they could. In particular:
> The only airframe ever to fly, XR219, along with the completed XR221 and part completed XR223 were taken to Shoeburyness and used as targets to test the vulnerability of a modern airframe and systems to gunfire and shrapnel.
It was not just a project that was "cancelled" but an industry. At least the Olympus made it to the Concorde.
It’s implied that the Arrow was destroyed quite so completely to stop the Soviets getting their hands on any useful knowledge.
Olympus was being used in the Vulcan and the 593 project started in order to produce engines for Concorde a year [1] before the TSR 2 was canned, so it wasn’t as if they could take those engines away.
Avro Canada were in trouble, and killing the project was the beginning of the end for them but it’s not as if they were the only ones. Hawker Siddeley (the TSR 2) wound up owned by BAC in 1977 and Bristol/Bristol Siddeley (Olympus engines) was bought by Rolls-Royce in 1966 (then Rolls were liquidated/state owned by 1971), so things did not go well for them either.
Orenda (manufacturer of the Iroquois) still exists, albeit as a sister company of Bristol Aerospace [2], and Bombardier joined together the remnants of Canadair, Short Brothers, Learjet and de Havilland Canada. It’s not like Canada doesn’t have any aerospace industry left.
My point, if there was one, was that the 50s-70s was a time when the aviation industry went through huge change worldwide, and everyone seemed to have the same short-sighted view that automation/missiles would eat the world (narrator: it didn’t).
The British are thankfully regaining the ability for space launches. There is a new spaceport being built in UK and a number of companies that plan on using it.
Years ago I read an alternate-history comic book series regarding a massively successful British space program. It was an entertaining and enjoyable read.
As far as the early failures, USA had a similar learning curve. For example, it took 7 tries before the first successful Ranger probe, which took photos of the moon on an intentional suicide mission in order to get roughly 1-foot resolution. But along the way they perfected techniques such as clean-rooms, telemetry, and redundancy.
It seems newbies often try to do too much. For example, an early Soviet Mars probe carried a mini-rover. It was overly bold: they should have kept it simple at the time, putting survivability over gizmos. Add fancy stuff on later missions after the basics are perfected. This incremental approach worked well for Soviet Venus probes. Early Japanese probes similarly tried to do too much too early.
If you're looking for a reasonably technical (but not completely rocket science!) history of the British space programme A Vertical Empire by C. N. Hill is really good, although, as a Brit, also quite depressing as you realise what might have been
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vertical-Empire-History-Programme-1...
These things had a ~100kg payload to LEO which is tiny in terms of space flight. For comparison a Falcon 9 v1.0 could take 100 times as much stuff into LEO and a Falcon Heavy can take 630 times as much stuff into LEO.
So it was a solid demonstrator of capability, but Briton would have needed to spend quite a bit on R&D to scale these things up.
That’s a similar payload to the modern Electron rocket. There’s a good market for launching small satellites. Much more so today than in 1970, of course.
Fair point, though the Electron rocket has 2 launches and 1 successful so I am not sure how large the market is.
The problem is you can generally stuff 2+ payloads into a single rocket which means small payloads can usually find some spare capacity on another launch at a discount. However, you can't really scale up a rocket that's not large enough.
Looks like they have a decent number of flights booked for the near future. It’s not a huge market, but there are small satellites that need to be in a unique orbit or can’t wait around for a matching payload to ride with. Time will tell just how big of a market that really is.
Actual communication satilies are still several tons. Cube sats are 1kg and you can toss hundreds of them with a tiny rocket. Thus the median satilite is light, but most payload capacity is taken up with big satellites.
Many early rockets had tiny payloads. The Atlas ICBM could be used as a stage-and-a-half orbital launcher, which was the first US satellite, payload being 68 kg (the whole rocket was in orbit, just without the booster engines): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_(satellite)
> These things had a ~100kg payload to LEO which is tiny in terms of space flight. For comparison a Falcon 9 v1.0 could take 100 times as much stuff into LEO and a Falcon Heavy can take 630 times as much stuff into LEO.
~100kg is a comparable payload to the Falcon 1 (particularly given it launched from a less equatorial site). It makes perfect sense for an organisation's first orbital rocket, and is more than enough to launch useful satellites.
The Germans had copied Goddard's, an American's, liquid rocket design and expanded upon it. These are Von Braun's words when speaking about Goddard: "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles"
also:
"He once recalled that "Goddard's experiments in liquid fuel saved us years of work, and enabled us to perfect the V-2 years before it would have been possible"
And if you don't believe me, here's Goddard's patent for a liquid fueled and a multi-stage rocket. Exactly what put a man on the moon:
Well it was a continuation that would have happened with or without the Germans, but they had made significant gains that we're a natural fit for the aspirations of the two blossoming superpowers at the time. The difficulty in getting to the moon was so vast that the statement that only Germans did it was just strange. German knowledge was a key part to a very large rocket initiative. It was going to happen, but faster with German help. By the way, it turns out that all the money the Germans spent on the V-2 was wasted since it took money from other programs that might have helped them with the war effort. So one could say that spending it on rockets was a bit premature.
I enjoy criticising my country as much as most British people, it being a national pastime, but your statement is just plain daft.
Since 1940 the UK has contributed hugely to the world - from the NHS and modern welfare state to scientific discoveries, medicine, engineering, pioneering computing, music, literature, contemporary art...
I agree its current political situation and economy is a mess, but retain some perspective.
You are right about the lack of diversity with respect to the economy and a general over inflated sense of importance. The second in particular is something I only noticed after a long time spent living elsewhere, my friends that haven’t lived elsewhere don’t see it that way. The U.K. is headed to becoming a firmly middle sized economy over the long term but friends in London often act as though they’re almost the USA or almost China.
It is fascinating how cultures hang on to the past after losing their place.
The Greeks and Italians still seem to frequently do it today, finding national self-esteem in their epic histories. The Spanish a lot less so.
It prompts me to consider what separates cultures that reboot and seek a new greatness even while having a strong history (eg China), and cultures that continue to perpetually drift on a former glory (eg Greece). China of course had the 'benefit' of hitting a particular low to reboot from (Mao era), with an extraordinary amount of space above to fill-in (a billion people to put to work starting from sub $200 GDP per capita in 1980).
"Well, we've done it, lads. We've been to space. Jolly good show, everyone. Now maybe those bloody Yanks won't rub our noses in it at the next NATO meeting."
"Shall we start planning for the next mission, guv?"
"Next mission?"
"Well, we are going back, aren't we?"
"Back? To space? Naw, mate, we just went to say we've been. 'Aven't got the quid to piss away on going back. We'll leave that to the bloody Yanks, let them deal with the mess up there."
