Part XVII - slight rewrite
Part XVII
Engineering is not merely knowing and being knowledgeable, like a walking encyclopedia; engineering is not merely analysis; engineering is not merely the possession of the capacity to get elegant solutions to non-existent engineering problems; engineering is practicing the art of the organized forcing of technological change... Engineers operate at the interface between science and society!
- Dean Gordon Brown.
I could have gone on flying through space forever!
- Yuri Gagarin.
In the late 80’s the Soviet Unions economy became more and more strained. Commonwealth intelligence experts estimated that it neared the breaking point, but then again that had been said for nearly ten years now, Still, it was seen as a rather ominous sign, when General-Secretary Jevgenij Primakov brought two young and energetic men from the more liberal part of the Communist Party into the inner circle. The two men, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, did their best to revive the failing Soviet economy, but all their reforms met fierce resistance from the Kremlin Old Guard and the military, especially since Gorbachev and Yeltsin pleaded that the space programme should be put on hold for at least a five year period and funds for the Red Army diverted to civilian industries and purposes. Ironically, just weeks before the violent collapse of the Soviet Union, General Alexander Lebed finally pacified Afghanistan, the country that had damaged the USSR’s economy as much as the space programme. As the USSR fell apart behind him, General Lebed nonetheless secured his men’s loyalty and ordered a withdrawal to the Motherland, or what was left of it! In the years to come Lebed and his Afghan-veterans would play a vital role in re-establishing order and re-create their country as present day Russia.
As the USSR totally disintegrated, so did the space programme that involuntarily caused said collapse. Several former Soviet citizens and military personnel were caught in space as the Cosmodromes at Baikonur, Kasputin Yar, Plesetsk and Valdivostock went off-line or got taken over by various nationalistic rebel groups. The Commonwealth Space Reaction Force now saw its first use as Griffyn Assault Shuttles escorted by AVRO Starfire deltas were used to board and “save” the stranded Soviets and secure their equipment.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union troubles soon spread all over Eastern Europe. A few peaceful revolutions took place – Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria to name the most obvious -, but most were violent uprisings where security forces, the military, police and paramilitary units fought savagely to gain control of their country. Even as France intervened in Yugoslavia the country disintegrated and eventually was split down ethnic lines – luckily the heavy French presence kept violence to a minimum albeit Serb and to a lesser extent Croat nationalists managed to cleanse most of the territories under their control for unwanted minorities.
France also managed with American and Commonwealth, mainly British, backing to secure a peaceful reintegration of the Communist People’s Republic of Prussia into the German Federation. There were, however, a few tense weeks in May where Prussian State Security refused to disarm and disband, but the Prussian People’s Army made it clear what would happen if the men of the PSS did not do as they were told. There was a price to pay and thus most of the PSS-goons went unpunished for their deeds as they slowly faded from public life. Mercenaries and terrorists with a past in Prussian State Security would plague the world for years to come.
At the same time Czechoslovakia broke up peacefully. The Czech Republic immediately sought closer ties with France and the German Federation, while Slovakia soon began to participate in the power struggle taking place Eastern Europe. The several thousands of French troops stationed in the German Federation, nor the Austrian Army could prevent Hungary and Romania clashing over Transylvania. Just as Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks and Byelorussians on occasion found the use of armed might preferable to negotiations. The threat of British intervention and American pressure only just kept poor Albania from getting devoured by its neighbours.
The new instability brought on by the collapse of the USSR made it imperative for the British military to update its land and air forces. The Army, for a long time overshadowed by their brothers in the airborne regiments and the Royal Marines, and the RAF had been somewhat neglected for some time, but now new armoured personal carriers, light scout vehicles and tanks – all light air transportable units suitable for rapid deployment – flowed into the Army’s armoury. New multi-role stealth planes – Wraiths and Spectres - replaced the often updated, but very dated Shadows, just as a new series of helicopters entered service. The new military demands strained the military’s budgets to the breaking point and some bases and regiments were merged or simply closed or disbanded, but the various armaments industries and cutting edge research laboratories – deep into portable laser and gauss gun research fx. - around the Commonwealth prospered immensely.
With the Orion catastrophe, the US space programme went on a backburner for the rest of the 80’s as the national space effort was reorganised and the two competing space agencies, the United States Navy Advanced Research Projects and the Air Force Space Operations Agency, was merged into one agency, the National Astronautics Agency, NAA. US President George Bush hoped to see the US re-enter the space race in the early 90’s with renewed vigour.
The NAA soon had its first success with the launch of the American equivalent to the CNS, the Aerospace Positioning System. The APS was more or less a copy of the Commonwealths Cook Navigational System, but at least originally was more focused on military needs than civilian ones, which meant that many US companies and corporations were forces to use the CNS. Allies of the USA, mainly France and the newly enlarged German Federation, had been junior partners and contributors, or more correctly providing funds, to the development of the system, but the dependency on the United States began to annoy Paris and Berlin – the latter having been made Federal capital, thus replacing Frankfurt, and centre of the resurgent German spirit after the collapse of the USSR and the reintegration of the People’s Republic of Prussia into the Federation. Thus a Franco-German space initiative was launched centred on a supergun-design.
The initiative was led by the French-married, but former Canadian citizen, Gerald Bull, and news soon began to leak from France that the spacegun programme was to bear fruit. News that were confirmed as a model of Bull’s spacegun design, Project Bonaparte, went on display at the Paris International Exhibition for Military Production in 1994, and two real size spaceguns were built by Giat Industries based in Versailles, in co-operation with Lohr Industrie of Hangenbieten, France. The guns had a 500-feet long barrel and weighed just over 2,000 tonnes. Their rocket-assisted shells could send telephone-booth-sized satellites up to 2,000miles into space. The French and their German partners among other things hoped to launch satellites that would give them some independence from their US allies and add some new and potent space weaponry to their aging arsenal. General Albert Duprecht, the C-in-C for space related programmes and weapons, confirmed some time after the Paris International Exhibition that his country, and Germany, was working on space weapons that could be launched from Bull's spaceguns. He also revealed that the guns could launch shells with atomic payloads.
The primary Bonaparte projects and, apparently, two alternative projects were placed in French Equatorial Africa, near Franceville. The area, normally known as Gabon, already had an extensive infrastructure and a well-educated and trained pool of manpower as the area had been home for a booming oil-industry since the 70’s. Still, it would take the French, and their German allies, nearly four years to build up sufficient infrastructure in the area, primarily in the form of a railroad from Port Gentil via Lambarene to Franceville and the launch site.
After the success of the Elizabeth Moon Base the Commonwealth Space Agency and the clever lads and lassies at CSIRO began in 1993 to construct a mostly civilian Moon base named Edward. With the lessons learned from the building of the Elizabeth Moon base taken to heart, the core of the new Moon base was centred around a cluster of pressurized cylindrical habitation modules and unpressurized resource modules. The main living areas were huge pressurized, naturally, dome-like structures, called Rao-domes after its Indian inventor, Professor U.R. Rao. The domes used the newest technology and were made of composite materials, fibres and ceramics, which made them extremely resistant, light and safe.
As part of the effort to build the Edward Moon Base, construction began on the Zuckerman Space Station in L1- Moon/Earth transit orbit. Plans had originally called for the space station to be built in the time between the constructions of the two Commonwealth Moon bases, but the CSA saw themselves capable of handling both projects at once. The smoothness of the process was a great tribute to MoS Digby Jones and his team at the Ministry and all the people at the CSA and CSIRO.
British PM, Margaret Thatcher, and her successor, Michael Portillo, both basked in the successes in space and capitalized immensely from them as the Conservative Party now dominated the Parliament and British politics totally. It has to be said, though, that both PM’s loyally backed the efforts in space, they didn’t just bask in its glory, and made sure that neither the Ministry itself, nor the inter-Commonwealth organs lacked British support!
The Conservatives nearly endless popularity was also aided by the booming British and Commonwealth economies. The emergence of the household computer in the late 70’s and early 80’s combined with the discovery of superconductors did wonders for the economy, and as the space programme expanded, a string of new high tech materials and groundbreaking medicines was released and drove the economy upwards like a AVRO Starfire delta firing its rocket booster. Furthermore while being intensely focused on the development and use of atomic energy, Britain accelerated oil exploration and drilling in the North Sea, at times in sharp competition with Norway, Denmark and Holland.
As the Commonwealth’s infrastructure in space grew and the threat from the USSR diminished, the CSA turned to exploration and scientific missions to understand space and its environment. Rumours even began to surface about a suggested Mars project…
As part of this new series of civilian science missions a number of probes were launched from Kilimanjaro Launch Facility. The Endeavour and the Beagle was sent around the Solar System to gather new knowledge and help the boffins back at CSA to understand space better. And as part of the very secretive Mars Project, or so the press at least believed, the Clarke, incl. the Darwin Robotic Rover, was launched and sent to the Red Planet.
Part XVII
Engineering is not merely knowing and being knowledgeable, like a walking encyclopedia; engineering is not merely analysis; engineering is not merely the possession of the capacity to get elegant solutions to non-existent engineering problems; engineering is practicing the art of the organized forcing of technological change... Engineers operate at the interface between science and society!
- Dean Gordon Brown.
I could have gone on flying through space forever!
- Yuri Gagarin.
In the late 80’s the Soviet Unions economy became more and more strained. Commonwealth intelligence experts estimated that it neared the breaking point, but then again that had been said for nearly ten years now, Still, it was seen as a rather ominous sign, when General-Secretary Jevgenij Primakov brought two young and energetic men from the more liberal part of the Communist Party into the inner circle. The two men, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, did their best to revive the failing Soviet economy, but all their reforms met fierce resistance from the Kremlin Old Guard and the military, especially since Gorbachev and Yeltsin pleaded that the space programme should be put on hold for at least a five year period and funds for the Red Army diverted to civilian industries and purposes. Ironically, just weeks before the violent collapse of the Soviet Union, General Alexander Lebed finally pacified Afghanistan, the country that had damaged the USSR’s economy as much as the space programme. As the USSR fell apart behind him, General Lebed nonetheless secured his men’s loyalty and ordered a withdrawal to the Motherland, or what was left of it! In the years to come Lebed and his Afghan-veterans would play a vital role in re-establishing order and re-create their country as present day Russia.
As the USSR totally disintegrated, so did the space programme that involuntarily caused said collapse. Several former Soviet citizens and military personnel were caught in space as the Cosmodromes at Baikonur, Kasputin Yar, Plesetsk and Valdivostock went off-line or got taken over by various nationalistic rebel groups. The Commonwealth Space Reaction Force now saw its first use as Griffyn Assault Shuttles escorted by AVRO Starfire deltas were used to board and “save” the stranded Soviets and secure their equipment.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union troubles soon spread all over Eastern Europe. A few peaceful revolutions took place – Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria to name the most obvious -, but most were violent uprisings where security forces, the military, police and paramilitary units fought savagely to gain control of their country. Even as France intervened in Yugoslavia the country disintegrated and eventually was split down ethnic lines – luckily the heavy French presence kept violence to a minimum albeit Serb and to a lesser extent Croat nationalists managed to cleanse most of the territories under their control for unwanted minorities.
France also managed with American and Commonwealth, mainly British, backing to secure a peaceful reintegration of the Communist People’s Republic of Prussia into the German Federation. There were, however, a few tense weeks in May where Prussian State Security refused to disarm and disband, but the Prussian People’s Army made it clear what would happen if the men of the PSS did not do as they were told. There was a price to pay and thus most of the PSS-goons went unpunished for their deeds as they slowly faded from public life. Mercenaries and terrorists with a past in Prussian State Security would plague the world for years to come.
At the same time Czechoslovakia broke up peacefully. The Czech Republic immediately sought closer ties with France and the German Federation, while Slovakia soon began to participate in the power struggle taking place Eastern Europe. The several thousands of French troops stationed in the German Federation, nor the Austrian Army could prevent Hungary and Romania clashing over Transylvania. Just as Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks and Byelorussians on occasion found the use of armed might preferable to negotiations. The threat of British intervention and American pressure only just kept poor Albania from getting devoured by its neighbours.
The new instability brought on by the collapse of the USSR made it imperative for the British military to update its land and air forces. The Army, for a long time overshadowed by their brothers in the airborne regiments and the Royal Marines, and the RAF had been somewhat neglected for some time, but now new armoured personal carriers, light scout vehicles and tanks – all light air transportable units suitable for rapid deployment – flowed into the Army’s armoury. New multi-role stealth planes – Wraiths and Spectres - replaced the often updated, but very dated Shadows, just as a new series of helicopters entered service. The new military demands strained the military’s budgets to the breaking point and some bases and regiments were merged or simply closed or disbanded, but the various armaments industries and cutting edge research laboratories – deep into portable laser and gauss gun research fx. - around the Commonwealth prospered immensely.
With the Orion catastrophe, the US space programme went on a backburner for the rest of the 80’s as the national space effort was reorganised and the two competing space agencies, the United States Navy Advanced Research Projects and the Air Force Space Operations Agency, was merged into one agency, the National Astronautics Agency, NAA. US President George Bush hoped to see the US re-enter the space race in the early 90’s with renewed vigour.
The NAA soon had its first success with the launch of the American equivalent to the CNS, the Aerospace Positioning System. The APS was more or less a copy of the Commonwealths Cook Navigational System, but at least originally was more focused on military needs than civilian ones, which meant that many US companies and corporations were forces to use the CNS. Allies of the USA, mainly France and the newly enlarged German Federation, had been junior partners and contributors, or more correctly providing funds, to the development of the system, but the dependency on the United States began to annoy Paris and Berlin – the latter having been made Federal capital, thus replacing Frankfurt, and centre of the resurgent German spirit after the collapse of the USSR and the reintegration of the People’s Republic of Prussia into the Federation. Thus a Franco-German space initiative was launched centred on a supergun-design.
The initiative was led by the French-married, but former Canadian citizen, Gerald Bull, and news soon began to leak from France that the spacegun programme was to bear fruit. News that were confirmed as a model of Bull’s spacegun design, Project Bonaparte, went on display at the Paris International Exhibition for Military Production in 1994, and two real size spaceguns were built by Giat Industries based in Versailles, in co-operation with Lohr Industrie of Hangenbieten, France. The guns had a 500-feet long barrel and weighed just over 2,000 tonnes. Their rocket-assisted shells could send telephone-booth-sized satellites up to 2,000miles into space. The French and their German partners among other things hoped to launch satellites that would give them some independence from their US allies and add some new and potent space weaponry to their aging arsenal. General Albert Duprecht, the C-in-C for space related programmes and weapons, confirmed some time after the Paris International Exhibition that his country, and Germany, was working on space weapons that could be launched from Bull's spaceguns. He also revealed that the guns could launch shells with atomic payloads.
The primary Bonaparte projects and, apparently, two alternative projects were placed in French Equatorial Africa, near Franceville. The area, normally known as Gabon, already had an extensive infrastructure and a well-educated and trained pool of manpower as the area had been home for a booming oil-industry since the 70’s. Still, it would take the French, and their German allies, nearly four years to build up sufficient infrastructure in the area, primarily in the form of a railroad from Port Gentil via Lambarene to Franceville and the launch site.
After the success of the Elizabeth Moon Base the Commonwealth Space Agency and the clever lads and lassies at CSIRO began in 1993 to construct a mostly civilian Moon base named Edward. With the lessons learned from the building of the Elizabeth Moon base taken to heart, the core of the new Moon base was centred around a cluster of pressurized cylindrical habitation modules and unpressurized resource modules. The main living areas were huge pressurized, naturally, dome-like structures, called Rao-domes after its Indian inventor, Professor U.R. Rao. The domes used the newest technology and were made of composite materials, fibres and ceramics, which made them extremely resistant, light and safe.
As part of the effort to build the Edward Moon Base, construction began on the Zuckerman Space Station in L1- Moon/Earth transit orbit. Plans had originally called for the space station to be built in the time between the constructions of the two Commonwealth Moon bases, but the CSA saw themselves capable of handling both projects at once. The smoothness of the process was a great tribute to MoS Digby Jones and his team at the Ministry and all the people at the CSA and CSIRO.
British PM, Margaret Thatcher, and her successor, Michael Portillo, both basked in the successes in space and capitalized immensely from them as the Conservative Party now dominated the Parliament and British politics totally. It has to be said, though, that both PM’s loyally backed the efforts in space, they didn’t just bask in its glory, and made sure that neither the Ministry itself, nor the inter-Commonwealth organs lacked British support!
The Conservatives nearly endless popularity was also aided by the booming British and Commonwealth economies. The emergence of the household computer in the late 70’s and early 80’s combined with the discovery of superconductors did wonders for the economy, and as the space programme expanded, a string of new high tech materials and groundbreaking medicines was released and drove the economy upwards like a AVRO Starfire delta firing its rocket booster. Furthermore while being intensely focused on the development and use of atomic energy, Britain accelerated oil exploration and drilling in the North Sea, at times in sharp competition with Norway, Denmark and Holland.
As the Commonwealth’s infrastructure in space grew and the threat from the USSR diminished, the CSA turned to exploration and scientific missions to understand space and its environment. Rumours even began to surface about a suggested Mars project…
As part of this new series of civilian science missions a number of probes were launched from Kilimanjaro Launch Facility. The Endeavour and the Beagle was sent around the Solar System to gather new knowledge and help the boffins back at CSA to understand space better. And as part of the very secretive Mars Project, or so the press at least believed, the Clarke, incl. the Darwin Robotic Rover, was launched and sent to the Red Planet.
