Part VII
If Britain had rejected satellites it would have been easier to reject the next major advance, and the next, and the next. There would have been no end to it. Yes, there would have been an end. Britain would have become a Switzerland with a few specialised skills - an admirable little Switzerland, but not a Britain.
- Ivan Southall, Woomera, 1962.
Turbulence is life force. It is opportunity. Let’s love turbulence and use it for change!
– Ramsay Clarke.
London was far from the only capital were a number of lessons from the Manchurian Crisis were drawn. Not only had the world nearly stumbled into what most likely would have ended as a full scale atomic war over a godforsaken place in the Far East, but in both Moscow and Washington the elites found that they might have lost. In general, the world appeared stunned by the Black Monarch’s suborbital flight, but especially Britain’s ability to lob atomic missiles halfway across the globe shocked both the senior military leadership as well as the Soviet and US politicos. Against ballistic missiles interceptors and ground based air defences were of no use. A missile race now began, where the United States of American and their rivals in Soviet Union tried desperately to catch up with Britain’s lead, and hopefully at the same time outdo each other.
At the newly created MoS it was quite obvious that Blue Streak was not the future, nor were simple semi-orbital flights like that of Smith and Radford in early ‘58, so another design was thus tested; the now famous Black Knight, the true forefather to modern rockets and the deadly Shadow multi-role rocket-planes.
The Black Knight rocket had begun life as a research vehicle programme in 1954. Black Knight was constructed on the Isle of Wight by Saunders-Roe and tested on the island at High Down. The engines were produced by Armstrong-Siddeley using hydrogen peroxide. Under the leadership of H. Robinson a MoS-team of scientists and engineers from the Commonwealth carried through the Black Knight programme. The first launch was in the autumn of 1958 from the now famous Woomera Rocket Base (Later to be named Woomera Space Center). Black Knight proved to be an outstandingly reliable vehicle - setting a series of altitude records and suffering only two mishaps in all of its history -, and unbelievable cheap too; Each vehicle cost less than 50,000£.
The Black Knight had several remarkable features, besides it cost efficiency and reliability, that is. One of the more important ones was the re-entry body made by ablative materials and low-drag shapes, which were of great interest to RAF’s experts. Ablative materials burn up on re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere, producing a char which is carried away from the rocket's body. The char which is shed carries heat with it, thus allowing the body to lose heat energy built up in the ablated surface. The low-drag shape meant that the re-entry body would re-enter fast and decelerate sharply at a lower altitude than earlier designs, making them more difficult to destroy with an anti-ballistic missile system – something both the USA and USSR worked feverishly on as a response to the Missile Gap.
Further, it was suggested that Black Knight could be stretched and used to act as a satellite launcher. Project Black Prince was thus born. Black Prince used Blue Streak as a first stage and Black Knight as a second stage as part of a three-stage launcher. The Black Prince would later lead to the development of Black Duke and Duchess super-rockets.
The experience with various aerodynamic designs and materials gathered by the teams working on the rocket projects spurred the development of a series of low RADAR-observable shapes and RADAR-absorbent materials that would later be used in the design of the Shadow-series of modern warplanes. But said expertise was not only highly valuable to the defence establishment, but also to civilian sector in general and led to advanced synthetic fluoropolymers and para-aramid polymer fibres that are in everyday use (as fx. coating for frying pans or as insulation or, in case of the PAPF, as a vital component in amongst other things tires and armour of all sorts) today. The discovery and use of PAPF led to a long vicious legal battle between Imperial Chemical Industry and its American rival, DuPont, who insisted on the rights to said material. Black Knight was thus an immensely important programme, gathering expertise and data valuable to Britain and the Commonwealth of Nations alike.
In 1962 the Ministry of Space launched their first satellite, Titania. A Black Knight Rocket lifted the small satellite into orbit. Titania was designed only as a technology test vehicle, and so carried no experiments. It was placed into a 531/1402 Km orbit, and would circle the Earth every 100 minutes for 40 years. The satellite's radio transmitter could be heard broadcasting on 137.56 MHz whenever it passed overhead. Had the Black Monarch and Blue Streak spurred the Soviets and the Americans, Titania positively caused a frenzy.
More importantly, though, the successful launch of Titania cleared to road for Arthur C. Clarke and Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai’s world-spanning system of communication satellites in geostationary orbits. In 1945 Arthur C. Clarke had published a speculative, but highly technical paper on Extra-Terrestrial Relays, where he laid down the principles of the satellite communication. Now some 15 years later his vision was to be realized. As a tribute to this great Briton, the geostationary orbit at 42,000 kilometres is duly named the Clarke Orbit by the Commonwealth Astronomical Society. It would not be long before the telecommunications market would become a major industry, and it would be a major source of income for the British and the Commonwealth, who monopolized nearly the entire commercial launch market.
At then same time, the Ministry of Defence commissioned its first spy satellite, the Prospero. The British would gain much by selling satellite surveillance photos to the Americans until the first of many American spy satellites became operational in 1967.
If Britain had rejected satellites it would have been easier to reject the next major advance, and the next, and the next. There would have been no end to it. Yes, there would have been an end. Britain would have become a Switzerland with a few specialised skills - an admirable little Switzerland, but not a Britain.
- Ivan Southall, Woomera, 1962.
Turbulence is life force. It is opportunity. Let’s love turbulence and use it for change!
– Ramsay Clarke.
London was far from the only capital were a number of lessons from the Manchurian Crisis were drawn. Not only had the world nearly stumbled into what most likely would have ended as a full scale atomic war over a godforsaken place in the Far East, but in both Moscow and Washington the elites found that they might have lost. In general, the world appeared stunned by the Black Monarch’s suborbital flight, but especially Britain’s ability to lob atomic missiles halfway across the globe shocked both the senior military leadership as well as the Soviet and US politicos. Against ballistic missiles interceptors and ground based air defences were of no use. A missile race now began, where the United States of American and their rivals in Soviet Union tried desperately to catch up with Britain’s lead, and hopefully at the same time outdo each other.
At the newly created MoS it was quite obvious that Blue Streak was not the future, nor were simple semi-orbital flights like that of Smith and Radford in early ‘58, so another design was thus tested; the now famous Black Knight, the true forefather to modern rockets and the deadly Shadow multi-role rocket-planes.
The Black Knight rocket had begun life as a research vehicle programme in 1954. Black Knight was constructed on the Isle of Wight by Saunders-Roe and tested on the island at High Down. The engines were produced by Armstrong-Siddeley using hydrogen peroxide. Under the leadership of H. Robinson a MoS-team of scientists and engineers from the Commonwealth carried through the Black Knight programme. The first launch was in the autumn of 1958 from the now famous Woomera Rocket Base (Later to be named Woomera Space Center). Black Knight proved to be an outstandingly reliable vehicle - setting a series of altitude records and suffering only two mishaps in all of its history -, and unbelievable cheap too; Each vehicle cost less than 50,000£.
The Black Knight had several remarkable features, besides it cost efficiency and reliability, that is. One of the more important ones was the re-entry body made by ablative materials and low-drag shapes, which were of great interest to RAF’s experts. Ablative materials burn up on re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere, producing a char which is carried away from the rocket's body. The char which is shed carries heat with it, thus allowing the body to lose heat energy built up in the ablated surface. The low-drag shape meant that the re-entry body would re-enter fast and decelerate sharply at a lower altitude than earlier designs, making them more difficult to destroy with an anti-ballistic missile system – something both the USA and USSR worked feverishly on as a response to the Missile Gap.
Further, it was suggested that Black Knight could be stretched and used to act as a satellite launcher. Project Black Prince was thus born. Black Prince used Blue Streak as a first stage and Black Knight as a second stage as part of a three-stage launcher. The Black Prince would later lead to the development of Black Duke and Duchess super-rockets.
The experience with various aerodynamic designs and materials gathered by the teams working on the rocket projects spurred the development of a series of low RADAR-observable shapes and RADAR-absorbent materials that would later be used in the design of the Shadow-series of modern warplanes. But said expertise was not only highly valuable to the defence establishment, but also to civilian sector in general and led to advanced synthetic fluoropolymers and para-aramid polymer fibres that are in everyday use (as fx. coating for frying pans or as insulation or, in case of the PAPF, as a vital component in amongst other things tires and armour of all sorts) today. The discovery and use of PAPF led to a long vicious legal battle between Imperial Chemical Industry and its American rival, DuPont, who insisted on the rights to said material. Black Knight was thus an immensely important programme, gathering expertise and data valuable to Britain and the Commonwealth of Nations alike.
In 1962 the Ministry of Space launched their first satellite, Titania. A Black Knight Rocket lifted the small satellite into orbit. Titania was designed only as a technology test vehicle, and so carried no experiments. It was placed into a 531/1402 Km orbit, and would circle the Earth every 100 minutes for 40 years. The satellite's radio transmitter could be heard broadcasting on 137.56 MHz whenever it passed overhead. Had the Black Monarch and Blue Streak spurred the Soviets and the Americans, Titania positively caused a frenzy.
More importantly, though, the successful launch of Titania cleared to road for Arthur C. Clarke and Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai’s world-spanning system of communication satellites in geostationary orbits. In 1945 Arthur C. Clarke had published a speculative, but highly technical paper on Extra-Terrestrial Relays, where he laid down the principles of the satellite communication. Now some 15 years later his vision was to be realized. As a tribute to this great Briton, the geostationary orbit at 42,000 kilometres is duly named the Clarke Orbit by the Commonwealth Astronomical Society. It would not be long before the telecommunications market would become a major industry, and it would be a major source of income for the British and the Commonwealth, who monopolized nearly the entire commercial launch market.
At then same time, the Ministry of Defence commissioned its first spy satellite, the Prospero. The British would gain much by selling satellite surveillance photos to the Americans until the first of many American spy satellites became operational in 1967.
