ferrel_hadley
New Member
Was a 60s project when everyone thought that space was the next big thing. People seriously believed there would be long term settlements on the Moon by 2000 and everyone was keen to get in on the action. Black Arrow was from a UK IRBM that ultimately was replaced by Polaris. But the UK had its fingers in another orbital pie, Europa, a multi national rocket that never made orbit. So they were pushing to be part of the white heat of the new technology. But by the early 70s everyone thought that the reusable Shuttle would eat up the launch market and it turned out orbital rockets are really really hard.
Europa fell apart and became part of Ariane, the UK seems to have worked out its cheaper to build the satellite and hire a launch service provider than build a small satellite launcher for a customer of one. Then Shuttle turned out to be cripplingly expensive and Ariane's had the commercial market to themselves for a while.
I have no idea why people are talking about the UK leading in peroxide technology (after the US had use peroxide for its lunar lander) or had gotten something from the post WWII fall out. The US over ran the German rocket factory and moved a large part of what was useful before the Soviets took over it as part of their occupation zone. While most of the technology people took a hair raising journey from the German Baltic coast to US lines under a fake order with von Braun leading them to get out of the way of the USSR troops. In terms of rockets and nuclear technology it was finders keepers.
The UK has never been a player in liquid rocket technology.
If we can take a small detour, into the Cold War the US had 3 teams building big rockets in the mid 50s, the Army, Navy and Air Force. The Army team had the Germans but had the shortest range rocket (Juno\Jupiter rockets ) while the Navy and Air Force were going intercontinental. The Navy had another project that Eisenhower picked as the US orbital rocket program (Vanguard) but that was publicly failing before Sputnik. Come Sputnik and Eisenhower canned the Army rocket project and transferred them to the newly created NASA, which needed rocket scientists, where their team lead went on to land men on the Moon. The Air Force and Navy had Atlas (USAF) coming out but went hard on solid fuelled rockets so you get (Titan as an intermediary) Polaris and Minuteman, both solid rocket fuelled, much earlier than the Soviets. But the world remembers the US getting horsed in the rocket race.
Kennedy took that horsing personally and opened the cheque book for NASA. Von Braun delivered. After than the UK had its little orbital grape fruit and worked out that in space you either go bit or go home.
