Prologue
Olympic athletes are fast. Cars are faster. Airliners are amazingly quick. Rockets are in a different league altogether.
The vehicle was moving at a velocity no human being can really comprehend, it was just very, very, very fast. We can measure it and see the resulting numbers, but no one has the instincts to truly understand what such speeds actually look like.
Radio beams reached out and were scattered back from the varied surface ahead, until the right signal was received at the right time to release the first burst of energy. Some of man’s most ingeniously concocted compounds did their job, focussing a wave of pressure that once again defies the imagination. Even so, these stupendous forces were only being used to start more fundamental processes. A small, curiously-shaped lump of silver-grey metal was on the receiving end of the blast. Just as it was squashed by a shockwave that would have flattened most buildings, the first blizzard of particles arrived from outside, after their fundamental nature allowed many of them to zip through what seemed like solid matter. Particle emissions and light output multiplied exponentially, flashing out, before being momentarily contained while the intense light vaporised the outer layers of another chunk of metal, creating an impulse that would squash it with forces nearly a million times greater than anything encountered so far. Less than half a microsecond later, a dense soup of light elements were already vastly hotter than the core of the sun when they were hit by a new shockwave of energy, emitted by another squashed lumps of metal at their centre. Temperatures multiplied by ten, and the process that powers the observable universe began, emitting unimaginable numbers of particles into the surrounding materials. Nothing could now stop the expansion, but for a few brief nanoseconds, the multiplication rate outran even this.
As the reaction wave peaked, the material now heated not just by the initial events and the central core but also by the early effects of the burn itself, energy output reached levels that defy any superlatives. For nearly a nanosecond, mankind's brilliance competed with the sun. Anyone looking would have seen a single bright flare, which then gradually faded.
A fraction of a second earlier, and things might have been very different.
"We interrupt this program for a CBS News Special Report."
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"Weeeeiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeee."
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Please stand by for…"
Fifteen Years Earlier…
On a tropically humid January morning, the curtain fell on what seemed to be the last act of Britain's space program. The final Silver Star Launch Vehicle lifted off from Australia's Rainbow Beach Space Launch Station, taking the last of the Post Office's “Hermes” TV relay satellites into orbit. In some happier world, it could all have been very different; the core of this rocket was originally built to launch the crew of Selene 7 towards the Moon. There was no Selene 7, there hadn’t even been a Selene 6. Satellite TV in the UK still had a bright future, but plans called for it to be carried by smaller, more advanced spacecraft sent up on American rockets, not these giant relics of the 1960s.
The achievements of the Selene Project, the British-French-Australian programme that took man to the Moon are known to almost everyone on the planet. It can therefore seem puzzling that the European Space Agency of the 1980s, an organisation that is backed by more and wealthier nations, could not even put a man into space. One answer depends on who you talk to, and reflects a far deeper truth of international relations: the British and the French don't like each other very much. They may now be at peace, sign great treaties, make grand statements and even co-operate in all sorts of ways, but that doesn't get around the fact that to the British, there is no-one more foreign than a Frenchman, while to the French, the barbarian horde of Anglo-Saxons still lurks menacingly across the channel.
Ironically, the Selene Project was in part sustained by this natural distrust - if Britain wanted to cancel it, France couldn't agree; when France wanted to end it, Britain wanted to see it through. When the two nations finally agreed to shut it down, the decision had more to do with economic necessity than anything else. However, the way the Project had been sustained and the manner in which its end was delayed and then hastened left a legacy of suspicion and distrust in the minds of a generation of Anglo-French aerospace engineers, politicians and bureaucrats. Only years of patient diplomacy and increasing pan-European co-operation and integration would allow most people to put that behind them.
However, in the space field, Britain remained isolated and the French-dominated ESA sought to keep it that way. In France, there was a legacy of resentment over Selene. The Project had been a genuinely equal partnership, and yet it was the UK that received almost all the acclaim. To put it simply, this had more to do with the use of English throughout the world than any sort of concerted attempt by the British to write the French out of the story of Selene. Nonetheless, it still hurt French national pride to see only pictures of the Union Flag on the lunar surface, or to hear sloppy and ill-researched media references to "Britain's Selene Project". Even Australia's modest contributions to The Project had been rewarded with more global acclaim than was accorded to France. Every Frenchman or woman knew of the vital and equal role the nation had played in Selene, but outside France it was too often assumed that Britain took the lead and did all the "clever bits", while the French helped out in some other, lesser ways.
In Britain, there was a great deal of bitterness that didn't help smooth negotiations with their European partners; the impressive-looking British space programme of the 1960s was built to sell satellites and launch services, but ultimately it couldn't compete with the Americans and it faltered just at the time when it should have aggressively dominated the early days of the European market. Britain's desperate desire to become a member of the EEC, and the Commonwealth-orientated nature of the space programme meant that it was all too easily traded away to assuage continental concerns over Britain's dedication to the European project. Instead of being a British triumph, it was the later, French-led ESA and its Europa rockets that ended up as the major player in the European space market.
The British had put crews into space and made Selene’s goals possible by building capable launchers based on their early ICBMs, whereas in the late 70s, the French built the "right size" rocket in co-operation with other European nations. The basic “Europa” rocket had been steadily improved over the years, but even the latest version, Europa 2-4, was not as powerful the Silver Star Launch Vehicle that Britain had first flown in 1967. The reason for this was simple; it didn't need to be. Thanks to technological advances, communications satellites typically massed less than two tons when launched into Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). Although Europa 2-4 could launch one of these with plenty of power to spare, it was optimised for GTO delivery, meaning it could only put about 7t into a low orbit, and even then it would use a trajectory that is unsuitable for manned flights. The Europa rocket was therefore all wrong when it came to launching crews, and in the late 1970s, ESA had more important priorities than flying astronauts anyway. It was quicker and easier to agree to fly the occasional crewman on board NASA's brand-new Space Shuttle in return for a modest contribution to the construction of America's space station "Freedom".
As the NASA Shuttle program expanded, it successfully competed for a major share of the commercial launch market, and ESA's Europas seemed destined to be little more than an assurance of independent European access to space - in many ways a duplication of the situation faced by Britain a decade earlier. Meanwhile, plans for the future were mired in controversy; several ESA members though the future lay in a manned rocket and a European space station, others wanted to keep to the deal with NASA.
One option that was briefly studied and dismissed was to resurrect some of the old Selene technology. Selene's orbital spacecraft, the PROM, was a proven vehicle, but it came with two insurmountable problems. The first was that it had been designed and built almost entirely in the UK; the French had only built some of the RCS thrust chambers and the crew's flight couches - it was as little as that. Nonetheless, the British government and the successors of Hawker Siddeley Dynamics (who had built the PROM) were happy to provide any technical assistance they could. Priceless national treasures such as the Re-entry Module of Selene 3 (on display in the Science Museum in London) or the equivalent Selene 5 vehicle (at the Museé des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris) could not be touched, however if any details were missing, several complete, un-flown PROMs existed in other museums. However, what killed the idea altogether was the fact that it would be very difficult to adapt the design to dock with a space station. On Selene flights, the PROM had never needed to dock with anything and so it had never been designed to do so. Adding a hatch and docking mechanism to the top of the ship was impractical; it would mean almost completely redesigning the internal layout of the entire re-entry module.
It would be better to start from a clean sheet, and that meant getting everyone's agreement on who built what, how it was paid for and exactly what it would do. Designing a manned spacecraft is difficult. Doing it through a committee of nine squabbling nations is virtually impossible, besides being insulting to the talents of European aerospace firms. France's Aerospatiale or Germany's MBB would have been quite capable of leading the project, ably assisted by a dozen other European firms.
Meanwhile, the British government looked on; any sense of resentment tempered by a degree of smug self-satisfaction. British firms built almost a fifth of the spacecraft that headed for geostationary orbit, technical and political links with the USA had never been better, and after a decade of decline, Britain's remaining aerospace industry was just starting to look up once more.