Upon a Dirty Flame - A British spaceflight TL set in the Voyage universe.

[Drunkrobot]

Just trying out a premise, tell me what you think.

Voyage is a 1996 novel by Stephen Baxter, detailing journey of NASA from landing a man on the Moon in 1969 to landing a man on Mars by 1986. There is also a spinoff short story called Prospero One, about the first (and last) British manned mission in 1974, and is the more primary inspiration, but I judge the content of the story to be too allegorical to be realistic, there no way Britain would've given up an entire, commercially-useful space programme. Downsize, maybe, a manned program might not be sustainable, but a satellite launch program at least would be a useful commitment. So, this timeline will follow an alternate path from Prospero One, but should stick mostly to what is said in the main book.


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1963, Spadeadam

Tim watched as the fellow ground crewman manhandled the heavy steel door shut. As he twisted the door locked, the rest of the team already began dissipating to their own spaces in the complex. The ground crewman stuck on a seal label and signed it. Already on the door and its frame was over a hundred identical labels, all stuck on and broken at the beginning and end of every fortnight-shift, the only times the door was to be open. Their quiet watch over the realm had, once again, begun.


He was born during the Battle of Britain, when his father had fought (and died) in his Hurricane defending the skies against the Luftwaffe. He sometimes wondered if he still would’ve been an RAF ground crewman had this Dad survived the war, and he wondered what he would think about parts of the RAF, possibly the most crucial part, spending its existence underground.


Tim turned and walked to the launch room to face his own Hurricane.


She was unpainted, her brilliant silver dulled by the gloomy light and the dust collected by a lifetime with no wind, filling the deep, cylindrical chasm that formed the heart of the complex. The top floor had no handrail, a balcony on a hinge ready to swing forward and grab her by the head, as it often did during inspection of the cargo. The Green Field one-megaton warhead sat in its cocoon in the nose-cone, rather literally radiating its promise to ‘The Second World’: We Will Take You With Us.


Tim admitted his knowledge on the warhead was limited, almost as much as any other member of the British public, but it didn’t bother him too much. His speciality was at the other end. The Bristol-Siddeley Pheidippides engine drank kerosene and hydrogen peroxide [1] and roared nearly 70,000 kg of thrust in return. It was this thrust that was to carry the missile and its warhead to some target or another in Eastern Europe. His job was to ensure the engine delivered that thrust, if the time came. On one hand, the fuel was hypergolic, so the job was comparatively simple. On the other, it was also toxic, so it was not.


For his engine, Tim feared, Eastern Europe was about as far as it was ever going to go, if that day ever came. However...


It was before the building of this silo, before the designing of Blue Streak, back when the Deterrent was carried by the V-Bombers, that the Russians lofted a tiny metal ball into orbit around the Earth. Only two years ago, both the Russians and the Americans started sending up men, and the Americans were doing their best to get to the Moon by 1970. These were the superpowers, engaging in stunts that Britain might’ve been able to afford a world war or two ago, but Britain seemed to be doing its best to keep its own pace in the new Space Age. Already, British satellites were being put into orbit on American rockets. If only Britain didn’t need to piggyback on the Yanks...


Tim examined the missile before him. It would probably need to be a bit taller, the warhead replaced by a second stage, and maybe a smaller booster to make the final kick, but it could be done, he knew. Already, the French were making their own space launcher, why should they be the first in Europe to match the superpowers?


His first checkouts of the engine wasn’t to start until later that evening, so he turned away from the mighty missile and went on to the lounge.


While fixing up a cup of tea, news blared from the radio, of a moment to define the history of many a space program.


“...hello, London, this is Lennard Parking, calling Radio Newsreel from Washington. President Kennedy, and First Lady Jacqueline, was shot today in an ambush, as President Kennedy’s motorcade left the...centre of Dallas, where the President was on a speaking tour. People screamed and laid down on the ground as shots were heard, and an associated press photographer, a man called Hodgkin's, said he saw blood on the First Lady’s head...”


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[1] This is the primary PoD concerning the British rocket program, here Blue Streak is designed with a kerosene/peroxide fuel mix rather than the H2/O2 mix used IOTL. It is a rather common staple of British missiles of this time to use this fuel, so used for its storable and hypergolic quality. This Blue Streak has a much shorter readiness time, which makes it practical for the four-minute warning for missiles based in Britain. This in turns means the plan to replace the V-Bomber force with silos holding Blue Streak missiles goes ahead.

 

[Miss Teri]

Interesting.

 

[Archibald]

Interesting POD. Surely peroxide is liquid at room temperature and doesn't boiloff like liquid oxygen, and then the Blue Streak become a second generation ICBM - akin to the Titan II but without the safety issues of storables / hypergolics.
Kerosene / hydrogen peroxide is a very underated propellant combination - squeezed between LOX/kerosene and hypergolics.

 

[Drunkrobot]

Interesting POD. Surely peroxide is liquid at room temperature and doesn't boiloff like liquid oxygen, and then the Blue Streak become a second generation ICBM - akin to the Titan II but without the safety issues of storables / hypergolics.
Kerosene / hydrogen peroxide is a very underated propellant combination - squeezed between LOX/kerosene and hypergolics.

Yep, it was non-cryogenic, compact and hypergolic. Black Knight, Black Arrow and Blue Steel all made use of it. These features allow the fuel to be kept in the tanks, ready to fire. The trouble is just how hazardous hydrogen peroxide is, and the lesser performance compared to kerosene/lox or H2/O2.

 

[Drunkrobot]

In 1945, Britain's imperial trajectory seemed ballistic, its apogee behind it. Entering the 20th Century with what was almost inarguably the most global influence and projected force of any nation on Earth, the expense of two world wars and a world financial crisis, an expense often made in more than mere treasure, had sapped and stagnated the power of the empire on which the Sun never set. The two principle allies that had joined it in the fight against Hitler's Reich, the Soviet Union and the United States, were larger in population, land area, and resources, and had leveraged their input to the grand alliance which had increasingly fashioned itself as the 'United Nations' into securing new spheres of influence in the embers of Asia and Europe, choking out fascism and taking measures to ensure the implementation of their own political and economic ideologies. Britain, entering the war as more-or-less the equal primary partner to France, was increasingly finding itself the third pole, a pole at risk of subordination to that of the United States as the defeat of the Nazis made the alliance of convenience to the USSR less palpable.

As Truman and Stalin left Potsdam, their eyes already on the defense and possible expansion of their newly earned spheres of influence, the ambitions of the newly-elected Clement Attlee were forced to be more humble. Faced with an aged and exhausted transport network, an industry geared more for producing bombers and guns than cars and washing machines, cities bombed out by the Luftwaffe and villages emptied of young men for the second generation in a row, India calling out for independence and much of the rest of the empire containing factions ready to ask the new superpowers for war surplus, Attlee's government swept into power on the promise of making Britain a kind of country it had never been before, focused more inward to the health and education of its citizenry rather than outward on imperial games to paint the world map red. However, even as Attlee's government came and went, followed by one last stint of the old war leader Churchill, who might be said to be the last Victorian Prime Minister, and the death of George VI elevated the young Princess Elizabeth to Queen, the ancient lion still had a roar, as raspy and hoarse as it was, and work was done to maintain as much as possible the status of, if not the Great Power, at least a Great Power.

If World War I had teased the potential of the airplane to add another axis to the battlefield, then World War II had brought the bomber plane to the peak of its use as a mass weapons system. The dive bombers of the Luftwaffe brought terror to the conquered cities of Europe in the first years of the war, but by the end Göring's force had been utterly ecplised. Starting the war with tiny and ill-conceived biplanes driven by weak propellor engines and sent to targets in low numbers, the RAF and USAAF had matured into devastating implements of war, capable of placing thousands of four-engineed bombers over any desired target in Europe, fitted with the latest of technical gadgets and gizmos and carrying bombs of such size and number to bust open even the deepest of bunkers. The investment was costly, but Britain and America, along with the Soviet Union, had emerged from the war with the most advanced aerospace sectors on the planet, the development of the jet engine promising to revolutionize civilian flight just as the race for large and reliable planes during the First World War had led to the first airliners in the 1920's. However, the refinements and advances of the aeroplane during six long years of war seemed to fall away at the thought of the unholy marriage between two superweapons.

In a desperate bid to recapture the shock and awe of the Stuka in its glory years, even in the face of the titanic industries of the Allies, Nazi Germany poured gold and the blood of countless slave labourers into the creation of 'Vengeance' weapons, aiming to deliver bombs to civilian targets in a way that was impossible to intercept. While the V-1 failed to avoid interception, RAF pilots in the new Gloster Meteors working out how to send it crashing down with only a tap of its wings, the V-2 proved impossible to defend against. At least, when it actually managed to target whatever it was being aimed at, which was quite rare. Following on from the theories of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the practical work of pioneers like Robert Goddard and Herman Oberth, the V-2, for all its problems as a weapons system, was a rocket more powerful than anything the Allies had developed. Relying on turbopump technology to move as much liquid prop, followed up by the liberation of France and the Low Countries, had pushed the V-2's available launch sites away from Britain. As the Western Allies pushed on towards and over the Rhine, and the Soviet Union swept though Poland and the Balkans, the Allies began to acquire more and more assets of the V-2 program, working missiles, spare parts, assembly and launch facilities, technical documents, and the very people who were designing and building them.

While Germany toiled and floundered with its 'wonder weapon', the Allies were quietly working on a weapon of their own, in a project out in the New Mexico desert, funded by the change left over from the construction of innumerable tanks, guns, ships and planes, and staffed by a mix of American, British and Canadian physicists and their opposite numbers which had escaped from Nazi-dominated Europe. Einstein's theory of mass-energy equivalence had dominated physics for decades, but the task of the Manhattan Project was to turn theory into a practical application, that is, a bomb that could be carried by a single aircraft and could flatten an entire city. Years of work would culminate in the detonation of 'Gadget' on the 16th of July, 1945, briefly creating what appeared to be a manmade Sun over New Mexico. Gadget's siblings, Little Boy and Fat Man, could be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to a far more devastating effect than the V-2 could've ever hoped to achieve.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, a pair of superweapons took their lives. The victorious Allies now struggled with the realities of the new world order they had to forge. Neither the ballistic missile or the atomic bomb had a ceiling to their improvement that anyone could see. A bomb which could vapourise a city of millions, and a rocket which could carry that bomb to any spot on Earth in less than an hour, in a way that could not be stopped once put in motion, were suddenly very real prospects, and the new superpowers understood that they could not let the other develop such a system while they themselves went without, such a course of action would put their influence and possibly their existence in peril.

While the United States and the Soviet Union shifted their massive war machines to fit the new Atomic Age, building new fleets of bombers and stacks of warheads of ever increasing potency, Britain and the rest of the European countries did their best to try and clear away the rubble and get their homes back in order. The broken up and occupied Germany suffered no illusions about its place in the foreseeable future, and France had a lot of work to do if it would going to convince anybody it was still a Great Power. Britain was somewhere in the middle, relatively well off compared to the rest of Europe but still with some very large commitments and ambitions. Still under ration and struggling to work out exactly how immense the debt Britain had to pay back in the years following the war, the brief surge of internationalism that founded the UN gave way to the hosility between the two blocs of the Cold War. It was clear, Britain could only hope for a fraction of the conventional military power of either the United States or the Soviet Union, if it was going to continue to wield the influence it still had then it needed the Bomb, as quickly as possible. Even as Attlee still hope for the good faith between East and West to last, his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, put into words the scramble to keep Britain among the major players on the world stage.

"We've got to have this thing over here whatever it costs … We've got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it."

 

[Drunkrobot]

Like most national rocketry efforts, Britain's did in fact start with the thought of space travel. The British Interplanetary Society was founded in 1933 to begin advocating, and privately experimenting on, the prospect of launching people on rockets into orbit around the Earth and to the Moon and the other planets. Their launching of actual rockets, however, only lasted until 1936, when they found that the Explosives Act of 1875 banned the private testing of liquid-fuel rockets in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, they kept on working, if only on theoretical studies, devising the first serious design of a rocket to take men to the Moon just before the start of the Second World War.

Humanity ended 1945 closer to space than it had ever been before. Metalworking and fabrication of materials had improved by leaps and bounds to bring the rocketships to life, high-altitude bombers with their airtight cabins had the beginnings of the life support systems needed to keep a man alive in orbit, and quietly there were machines being built that could digest the necessary mathematics, autopilot gadgets and electronic brains that could run calculations more quickly than any human. But if guidance systems, life support equipment, fuel tanks the size of the tallest buildings on Earth, and a man in a silver suit, were ever going to move a centimeter off the ground, engines orders of magnitude more powerful were going to need to be built.

The United States had already claimed the bulk of the material leftovers of the V-2 Programme, and it seemed most German scientists and engineers who were ready to travel overseas to continue their work knew that Britain wouldn't have as much funding and they would never be safe with the Soviets what with the actions of Germany during the war. However, General Eisenhower agreed that Britain needs its share of the spoils, and so Operation Backfire was organized in Cuxhaven, Germany, to collect V-2 parts and scientists to come to Britain and to demonstrate the operation of the V-2. A steam turbine powered by the reaction of concentrated Hydrogen Peroxide would drive the pumps for liquid oxygen and an ethanol/water mixture, sending the fuel/propellant through piping around the combustion chamber, to keep it at a 'cool' 2,600 °C during flight, before entering the chamber itself to produce 265 kilonewtons of thrust. Three V-2s were launched at Cuxhaven in October 1945, one member of T-Force, tasked with capturing Axis technologies, commenting "So this is what it's like being at the other end."

The Allies had staked their piece of the V-2 pie, the slices far from being equal, and while the soldiers would, for now, stay in Germany to enforce denazification, the boffins returned home to absorb the knowledge gained from the V-2. Ironically, after taking the lion's share, including Wernher Von Braun and 100 other key members of the design team, America seemed content to depend on their, admittedly huge and capable, bomber force to deliver their new type of bomb. Already by June 1946, contracts started to be handed out for the next generation of bomber aircraft, taking in all the technical gains from World War II and improving on them to produce an aircraft that could drop a bomb deep inside Eurasia, an aircraft that would eventually become known as the B-52. The Soviets, having needed to focus on their army during the war, had no such bomber force and thus was already well behind on the delivery gap, not even having a bomb to deliver. While the Soviets would begin work on their bomber force, Stalin would focus on two key projects above all, the detonation of an atomic bomb and the launch of a missile that was, at the very least, an improvement on the V-2. As the scale of nuclear war started to dawn on them, they figured that a nuclear delivery system was something that only had to deliver once. Work began to get the V-2 production facilities running again, the Soviets using the few German scientists they captured to essentially learn how to build a copy of the V-2, which they dubbed the R-1. Gathering together its own native talent, some notable figures having to be brought out from the Gulag, the Soviets worked, quietly and with little hubris, on their missiles.

Britain expected to be the second nation to build an atomic bomb, having a claim to have done so already in partnership with the Americans. They were keen to harness the Atom to provide their people with a higher standard of living, and increasingly to keep the Soviets in their half of Europe. The shrouding of the fruits of the Manhattan Project by Congress, even to America's closest allies, would be a snub that would prove longer to properly undo itself than many thought at the time. British scientists would gradually make their way back home from Los Alamos as security tightened. The Cabinet agreed in 1947 that Britain would need to resume research on atomic weapons and reactors, starting the project known as High Explosive Research. Five years later, three years after the Soviets fired 'First Lightning', Operation Hurricane detonated an atomic bomb in Australia. The bomb was placed on HMS Plym, a Royal Navy frigate that served during the war, and atomized the ship in the detonation, to research the potential of a bomb being smuggled to its target via boat. Bomber Command would receive their first bombs in 1953, but not before the United States had already began the next generation of nuclear weapons with 'Ivy Mike' in November of the previous year. This was a hydrogen bomb, which used a small 'conventional' fission bomb to trigger a fusion reaction in what was essentially a tank of hydrogen, producing a blast much larger for a given weight of warhead. Work would continue to get Britain an H-Bomb of its own, as well as something to deliver it. The English Electric Canberra, the RAF's first jet-powered bomber, was about to enter service at the start of the 1950's, with the three aircraft that would become the V-Bombers being worked upon. But there was institutional memories of the V-2, resurfacing as it became clear the United States and especially the Soviet Union were pushing the technology, literally, to new heights. The cold had set in by the early 50's, and there had to be a response in place so that, if the day came when atomic bombs would be flying to London, then mutual destruction would at least be assured.