Backroom Boys

by Francis Spufford

  The dream was not worth much in 1965, but it might be worth a small gamble. The historian David Wright is fascinated by the complex interference patterns caused as discovery and policy, dream and realism, interacted in the British programme. ‘I would not underestimate the romantic reasons why we got into Black Arrow,’ he says. ‘Even people who worked in the ministry went home and read science fiction, saw science-fiction stuff on the television; they dreamed too. But there were people, and perhaps the same people, who had to make hard-headed decisions about what would pay off, and I think they realised that Black Arrow would keep them in the space exploration business. Maybe, just maybe there would be hard-headed, accountants’ reasons to be in space later. They didn’t want to play now, they didn’t want to spend money now, but they wanted a place at the table in case it was going to pay off in future.’

  Black Arrow kept Britain in the game. It was an ante, a low-denomination casino chip. It was the minimum stake the house allowed.

  *

  From the very beginning of the effort to realise Black Arrow, there were constraints on the project that had nothing to do with design, properly speaking, and everything to do with reusing the existing Black Knight infrastructure. The relative power of the lower two stages had to be balanced so that the spent pieces of the rocket would fall on empty areas of Australia, for example. The width of the first stage could only be expanded to fifty-four inches, because that was the maximum that would fit into the test stand at High Down. And the same arbitrary limits pressed on the building of Black Arrow’s engines.

  Fortunately, there had already been an intermediate generation of the Gamma known as the Stentor, built with military money to be the engine of the Blue Steel self-propelled bomb. Blue Steel was designed to be released from a Vulcan over the wheatfields of Byelorussia and to fly the last 200 miles of its journey on its own. Over the target, a little hatch opened on the Blue Steel and the warhead dropped out – for no reason I can discern except that the engineers disliked the idea of a thermonuclear explosion taking place inside their creation. It’s not as if the blast would have been muffled in any way. So Stentor was available as the template. The budget allowed for another half-generation of technical advance on it. Ideally, the Ansty engineers would have been able to satisfy Black Arrow’s propulsion needs from scratch. The first stage would then have had a few rocket chambers much larger than Black Knight’s – minimum criticality. Instead, they had to get the thrust by combining eight Gamma chambers, arranged by pairs in a pattern like the arms of a cross, and tiltable on each axis to give control over the pitch, roll and yaw of the rocket as it climbed. For the second stage, they used two chambers mounted on intricate swivels which gave free movement in all directions.

  Word came down from Joe Lyons, high up in the Armstrong Siddeley company hierarchy, that the engineers were to rein in their creative impulses. ‘That was part of the rules of the game,’ remembers David Andrews, one step below Lyons as Chief Engineer of the Rocket Department. ‘He wouldn’t even let us change the gearbox when we went over from the Stentor, although the new Gamma didn’t need one of the drives. We said, “We’ll just redesign the gearbox and take it off.” “You will make it to the same patents,” he said …’ New thinking from the likes of John Scott-Scott over in the Research section of the Rocket Department was only useable if it could be sneaked into the design at no extra cost. ‘The technology stood still as of 1956,’ Andrews emphasizes ruefully, ‘but we went on until 1971 using it, and making small changes to it.’

  However, in David Andrews, Ansty had a leader for the Black Arrow contract who took a philosophical interest in the design process itself; someone who found consolation for not doing the bolder work the engineers were capable of, in the fine-tuning of a project which was actually going into space. He seems to have experienced the arbitrary constraints on Black Arrow as a forcing-ground for clear thought – perhaps, it struck me as I talked to him, in the same way that the arbitrary rules of a stanza compel poets to wrestle their intentions into definite forms. He talks freely about the ‘aesthetic points’ of the Stentor engine, discriminates between the ‘beautiful’ in engineering and the merely ‘tidy’. ‘The most beautiful piece of engineering I’ve ever seen’ was the LH10 hydrogen–oxygen engine for the space shuttle, made by Pratt & Whitney. ‘It was absolutely breathtaking. But’ – he says, the gulf between the two cultures promptly reopening – ‘you’d have to know why, so I can’t explain that.’ Clarity is his watchword. When I met him, he was looking forward to prostate surgery with the stoical sense that some in-service degradation of his own moving parts was to be expected. ‘I’m not worried about the operation,’ he said, ‘because I know exactly what they’re going to do.’

  It’s clear from others’ memories that he was both a very demanding and a very satisfying person to work for. He instituted a regime of continuous testing, based on the old Ansty maxim, ‘If you don’t know what to do, do something, and measure it.’ Most rocket programmes deal with the need for their products to work perfectly by running off batches of the provisionally completed rocket, launching them, and seeing what happens. It’s a recognised cost in rocketry. There were not going to be completed Black Arrow vehicles available in the numbers which would allow this sort of proof by trial-and-error. So the Gamma engines for the first stage were prepared for their 131 seconds of working life by another method; the flaws were ironed out by firing the engines alone in the underground test bed at Ansty, over and over and over again. There were setbacks. An experiment in building the rocket chambers with thinner walls led to an explosion, and meant that a whole sequence of Gammas had to be discarded. But every day the results from the newest test were fed back into the design process to refine the engine further. ‘The ratio of development firings to firings of the product was extremely high, and that was why it was so reliable,’ says David Andrews. ‘We were able to do this because we had a form of organisation which enabled us to do a firing every day, change the engine as required, and have it refurbished with new components for the following day. We had the night shift on making the bits.’ Like the Saunders-Roe test site at High Down, the Ansty test bed used thousands of gallons of water running through a curved duct to soak up the heat from the engine. Huge columns of steam rose up into the Midlands sky. There were occasional complaints from the maternity hospital nearby, not about the danger, but the noise. Sometimes, if a cloud already heavy with vapour passed overhead, the extra steam was just enough to make the droplets precipitate out and start a very localised shower. One memorable day, an inspection team from the Ministry of Supply were soaked by a downpour a hundred yards across and never wondered why they had been placed at that exact spot on the tarmac to witness a firing.

  The result of all this was a programme that defied expectations by being tight, self-disciplined and cheap – more of a white mouse than a white elephant. HTP cost £175 a tonne. But as the years of the late 1960s passed, to be remembered by most people for other things than British breakthroughs in zero-gravity bearings, the odds on Black Arrow altered for the worse. While Britain laboured to put a small research satellite into orbit, the Americans were on their way to the moon, and the Wilson government was more interested in persuading the British aerospace companies to amalgamate than in one, isolated research project. At Ansty, Armstrong Siddeley became Bristol Siddeley and then Rolls-Royce; then Rolls-Royce went bankrupt and had to be nationalised. On the Isle of Wight, Saunders-Roe became the British Hovercraft Corporation and would shortly be Westland, all with the same people still doing the same jobs in the same places. Meanwhile, the already minimal allowance of flight tests for Black Arrow was whittled back still further. The two prototypes and five proving flights originally planned shrank to one prototype and three flights at Woomera. The timetable suffered too.

  If you want to know what Black Arrow looked like when it was finished, go to the Science Museum. Completed but unfired, one of them is lying in pride of place along the floor of the S
pace Gallery, among slender British meteorological rockets named after birds: Skua, Petrel, Skylark, Stonechat. As you go in, the V2 that bloodily inaugurated the British space age hangs over your head. A little further on, a ring on the floor the size of a Saturn V illustrates the Black Arrow engineers’ joke: that their baby could have been a bracing strut for von Braun’s monster. It really would almost fit in widthways. As it rests on its side in the museum, Black Arrow’s first stage is a little taller than head height; the second stage comes up to your chest. Here and there, the thin riveted panels of the skin have been replaced by perspex so you can see the intestinal tangle of fuel lines and HTP lines serving the rocket chambers. These are contrastingly huge and simple: monumental bells of dulled metal, with shiny brazed bands at rim and waist, and inside a pronounced, ridged grain, like the grain of wood, from the welds when it was assembled. Black Arrow’s front end is painted orange. Here the third-stage motor and the payload rode inside a casing shaped like the head of a rifle bullet, long and aerodynamic. But the shape as a whole is curiously stumpy compared to the default picture of a rocket in your mind. The only rockets as sawn-off, as fat in proportion to their length, are the private-sector American experiments of the last few years.

  Saunders-Roe crated up R0, the first Black Arrow ‘development vehicle’, and shipped the set of bespoke travelling cases to Australia by sea. In the early years of the Woomera range, British engineers had travelled out by a route almost as slow as the sea voyage: they spent ten days flying from one RAF station to another across the world, Malta–Aden–Karachi–Singapore–Darwin, waking each day to eat bacon and eggs in tropical heat, and then jolting around in webbing seats in the roaring fuselage of a bomber until the next outpost of home cooking coagulated on the blue horizon. By 1969, they used the airlines, and it was comparatively easy to change planes at Adelaide for the flight out to the Arcoona Plateau, and the bungalows of Woomera. There were families at Woomera, and a primary school, and churches, but in atmosphere and customs it was primarily a military town, very male and rowdy to compensate for the secretiveness of the life there. There was nothing to do when the sun was high but work, and nothing to do at the end of another scorched, dusty day but drink, and sometimes fight. Because Woomera counted as a home posting, the civil-service rocketmen of the RAE only received 7/6 a day for living expenses, so it was a point of honour for their luckier company colleagues to buy the pints. The furniture was cheap and easily replaceable in the Senior Mess, the Staff Mess, the Junior Staff Club, and the ELDO Mess where the contractors for the ill-fated European launcher drank. The beer flowed. The punches flew.

  R0 was unpacked, checked, mated together in the filtered air of the Test Shop, and launched on time in June 1969. Only the first stage was live. Fifty seconds into the flight, the eight first-stage Gammas lost co-ordination, R0 veered off course, and the Range Safety Officer pressed his button and blew it up. It was not a heartening start. Of course, problems like this were precisely what the flight tests were designed to reveal. It was a predictable mishap, one of the normal teething troubles in the development of a new rocket. But there were so few test vehicles to play with in Black Arrow’s case that the loss of R0 started a slippage in the schedule that was never made up. The trials were supposed to be finished by March 1970. Instead, R1 had to repeat the test of the first stage and was repeatedly held up by minor faults. R2, with all three stages live, did not take off until September 1970 bearing its dummy satellite, a gold-plated sphere called Orba. This time, a leak in a pipe shared by two systems sent a false message to the valve controlling the HTP pressure in the second stage. The pressure dropped, the rocket chamber was starved of HTP, and the second-stage engine cut out fifteen seconds early. Grimly, the engineers watched the solid-fuel third stage ignite. Despite some defects, Orba emerged successfully from the payload casing, but it had not reached orbital velocity, and it plummeted into the Gulf of Carpentaria, a gold streak down the sky.

  Eleven panels of engineers reviewed Black Arrow. It was the spring of 1971 by now, and they had still not been able to demonstrate every component of the system working right just once. ‘That was quite a trying time,’ says Iain Peattie, the RAE’s Project Officer for Black Arrow in its latter days. ‘In view of the fact that we were putting up a satellite with the next Black Arrow, we had to be absolutely sure that we had not got any residual faults in the system. And certain members of the panel assumed they had a free hand in redesigning various aspects of the vehicle, but in terms of the amount of money left in the kitty, it was absolutely impossible to introduce any large-scale changes. Nevertheless, we cured the problems.’ Peattie steered through a minimal redesign – two pipes instead of one in the second stage, a set of ‘flow restrictors’, a rare redundant system to guarantee the performance of the third stage. A fierce struggle is buried here. Dry, Scots, practised in policy as well as engineering, Peattie was more guarded than any of the other rocketmen I met. He habitually played down difficulties, as if understatement were the next best thing to the silence that once enwrapped Black Arrow under the Official Secrets Act. Perhaps he brought the habit of discretion with him when he was summoned from the sensitive world of defence intelligence in Washington after R0 blew up. Look, I said. Let me turn this around. If I said to you, I have here a satellite launcher development programme which will cost £9 million, and will have three proving flights, and you were just hearing out my proposition from scratch, what would you think? ‘It would be enormously difficult,’ said Iain Peattie. And laughed.

  That was also the spring when the House of Commons committee convened to review Britain’s involvement in space. They began taking oral evidence on 2 February 1971. The MPs were well disposed, eager to dispel the impression caused by the R2 failure that ‘we were not fundamentally good at this sort of thing’. Several had an aeronautical background; young Mr Tebbit had been an airline pilot. But as they investigated Black Arrow, among the other items on their agenda, they found that only the aerospace companies directly involved in producing it seemed to be in favour now, while in government the support for it was faint and equivocal. Arthur Palmer MP, to Mr A. Goodson of the Ministry of Aviation Supply: ‘Would it be true to say if we had our time over again we would not have bothered with Black Arrow?’ Mr Goodson: ‘That is a very difficult question. If we were back at the same time, we should probably do the same thing again, but with hindsight, it is another matter.’ Mr Tebbit: ‘Would it not have been cheaper to buy Black Arrow capability outside rather than to have developed Black Arrow?’ Mr Goodson: ‘Yes.’ Satellite manufacturers were adamant that they did not need a British launcher, although Sir Harry Legge-Bourke MP hammered hopefully at the idea that the Americans might cut off the supply of rockets. The more the committee probed, the more evident it became that Black Arrow’s constituency had finally faded away. It was unproven; its purpose was obscure; its launches were too few and far between for industry to build a schedule round it. The loss of confidence was promptly demonstrated in the most straightforward way. On 29 July 1971, before the Select Committee had time to reach a conclusion, Frederick Corfield, Heath’s Minister for Aerospace, stood up in the Commons and announced that Black Arrow was cancelled. The image of Dan Dare shimmered like air above a desert and vanished for good. The dream was over.

  *

  Or almost over. R3 was already on its way to Australia, and rather than shipping it back home to be dismantled, the engineers were allowed their last chance to prove the system, if only to themselves. Derek Mack was the leader of the Saunders-Roe team at Woomera. ‘We were charged to do it,’ he told me. ‘We were committed to do it. It was a relatively simple system, and everyone from the operators right up to the most senior administrator wanted to see that this piece of kit would work.’ Carefully, R3 was unpacked. Carefully, it was transported out to Range E, north of Woomera village. The one remaining Black Arrow was lifted into the gantry, and the most cautious imaginable countdown began. In the payload bay was a 66-kg satellite, octag
onal, surfaced with blue solar cells. The original intention had been to call it Puck, after the sprite who put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes, but Frederick Corfield reputedly said that he wouldn’t trust himself to announce that name in the Commons. So, with a wryer sense of aptness, they named it Prospero: the magician who lays down his book, who gives up power over earth and heaven.

  On the first of the October days that they tried for a launch, a gritty wind got up in the morning and blew persistently all day long. Mindful of the danger of wind shear in the first couple of hundred feet of the ascent, the launch crew waited, and waited, until the light began to go, and then staggered back to the ELDO Mess, covered in dust and not in the best of moods. The barman set a row of pints in front of them. ‘So,’ said a grinning Aussie, ‘did ya launch ya rocket?’ This was a blatant wind-up in itself. Everyone in Woomera heard the thunder when a rocket went up, and felt the subtler shockwave of pride travelling out from the launch pad. But it was a while since Australians had regarded British technology with starry eyes. No, said the Brits bitterly, they had not launched their rocket, as it happened. Mutter mutter wind mutter mutter wind shear mutter mutter bloody desert mutter mutter. ‘Awww,’ said the Aussie. ‘Did the wind blow ya match out?’ Instant brawl.

  But 28 October dawned clear and cool, with only a light breeze across the toxic clay of the gibber plain. Derek Mack drove to Range E at 7 a.m. and relieved the night shift. The tanks had been fuelled with HTP and kerosene overnight, and the various explosive bolts that would separate the stages had been armed. Through the morning, the launch crew worked their way down their checklists once more. At 11, they rolled back the gantry from the rocket. R3 swayed ever so gently in the breeze. One by one the radio systems aboard were switched on and checked. They armed the large explosive which would destroy the rocket if the Range Safety Officer decided it was going the same way as R0; they withdrew the steel claw that pinned it to the ground. R3 was ready to go. At 12.30 the Saunders-Roe crew moved back to the blastproof Equipment Centre 700 metres away where the ground systems were controlled, and took their places. The Range Controller started the thirty-minute countdown. Anyone could stop the clock, no matter how junior, but over the radio the reports from the different subsystem controllers and the tracking stations came back steadily positive, if in one case heart-stoppingly close to the two-minute deadline. The Range Controller extended a finger and switched over to the automatic timer which controlled the last events of the count.