Backroom Boys

by Francis Spufford

  At minus ten seconds a squirt of HTP through an umbilical spun the first stage turbopumps up to 50,000 rpm. Zero, and first-stage engine start. HTP pumped through the catalyst packs into the eight rocket chambers: 600°C. Kerosene ignited instantly in the slipstream: 2,400°C. Black Arrow’s 50,000 lb of thrust built smoothly against its 40,000 lb of weight. It always took a few breathless seconds to reach the ‘instant of move’. ‘Time seemed to hang,’ said Derek Mack. ‘The first indication we’d have in the Equipment Centre was when a small electrical connection was broken at the base of the rocket. The instant-of-move light was just below the window so you could see both things in the same field of view. We saw the smoke and the bits of steam, and then it lifted off slowly and majestically.’ No flames showed beneath R3’s steel skirt. It rose on an invisible column of superheated steam. By the time the assembled VIPs, controllers and cheering engineers at the Instrument Centre five miles to the rear could see it, it was a yellow-white vapour trail accelerating upwards.

  ‘Then it was back to the telemetry.’ Derek Mack’s team were now out of the loop, but the raw data from the sensors aboard R3 was coming to them as a set of fluctuating white lines on a monitor in the Equipment Centre, and they clustered round, deducing the progress of the rocket above them. At plus 131 seconds, the first stage engines shut down, exactly on time. R3 was already moving at more than a mile a second, twenty-six miles up from Woomera in a sky dimming to black and glinting with stars. A crack of explosive bolts: first stage separation. This was the moment made famous on film by the Apollo moonrockets, but Black Arrow could not run to frills like cameras, so there was no one to see as the spent stage tumbled away backward towards the red desert. On the monitor a white line blipped upwards. Plus 137 seconds: second-stage engine start, exactly on time. The two Gammas burned smoothly and strongly. The line representing the HTP tank pressure stayed just where it should be. R3 passed the point on the threshold of space where R2 had failed, and the engines thundered on. It was beginning to dawn on the engineers that they were watching a virtually perfect performance. ‘We saw one event occur, then your mind moved over to the next event, and it occurred, just as we’d written it down. It was almost like a copybook exercise. You just couldn’t believe how cleanly the second stage started up, and when it shut down there was no coughing or spluttering, it was clean …’ Wishes were turning into facts faster than seemed wholly lucky. Surely something must go wrong? ‘The launch team had been there before. We’d had previous launches seem good, and then as the mature information came we’d realised more and more that there were problems. So we sort of … kept our powder dry.’

  R3 coasted on upwards for five and a half minutes. Derek Mack packed up in the Equipment Centre and headed back to town. Then, 303 miles high, as R3 floated across the top of its parabola, the solid Waxwing third stage lit and gave R3 its final boost into orbit; not a Spitfire impossibly aiming for outer space, or a rocket-ship piloted by Dan Dare against the Mekon; just an assembly of precision machinery from the Midlands and the Home Counties boldly going where no precision machinery from the Midlands and the Home Counties had ever gone before. Prospero bumped once, gently, against the debris that had accompanied it into orbit, and sailed away north-westwards around the blue curve of the planet at 17,000 mph, spinning like a giant glass Christmas-tree bauble.

  The first confirmation came from a satellite tracking station in Fairbanks, Alaska. ‘We have an operational satellite overhead on 137 megahertz.’ Pandemonium at Woomera; uproar; rivers of beer. Everyone from the van drivers to the visiting VIPs drank in the ELDO Mess that night. The party was long and loud, because the attempt to orbit Prospero had been the last thing between the rocketmen and the end of the programme, and this, the celebration, was the last of the last. When the sun came up the next morning over the desert, the hangover would encompass the whole of British rocketry. The future would begin, the future that would not even remember what they had done, except in circles of space enthusiasts almost as small as the BIS in 1944. Back in England, the young Stephen Baxter was building a scale model of Prospero in his bedroom. But he was a space junkie, junior version; the general public in 1971 was growing bored with astronauts playing golf on the moon or driving around in their lunar rover; they would scarcely remember that last baroque stage of the Apollo missions, let alone this miniature triumph. The man from the Department of the Environment would come to see the padlock put on the gate of the High Down test site, and Jim Scragg of Saunders-Roe would put the key in his hand, and they’d walk away down the access road cut in the white chalk. So tonight they drank to hold off the morning. Of course, it was better to finish with a success than a failure, but success gave a special bitterness to stopping at all, which would be there in the morning like a sour taste in the mouth. So another round, and then another, and another, in the packed room where the dry heat seemed to boil the beer straight out of your pores.

  *

  After the party, the post-mortem. The Select Committee’s report had been published at Westminster the day before the launch. The MPs who wrote it had not known that Black Arrow’s history of delays would end in vindication, but they put their finger on an essential characteristic of the programme, in these sympathetic but unsparing words:

  As so often in the development of new technology, economy in expenditure has resulted in too little being done to achieve success and the money, time and effort that has been expended has been spent to little purpose. It seems to us to be a classic case of ‘penny wise, pound foolish’.

  The cheapness of Black Arrow was a great achievement. But as the Select Committee understood, it was also a sign of its limitations. The designers at Ansty and Cowes had squeezed out almost all of the performance gains that were possible without upgrading Black Arrow radically. The modifications required to turn Black Arrow into a launcher with actual customers in the comsat business would have cost not a little extra money, but a whole order of magnitude more. ‘I think one needs to go up by a factor of ten,’ said Iain Peattie. That’s £90 million rather than £9 million. In other words, a launcher fit for the future would have been in the same price bracket as comparable rockets abroad; economical perhaps, but not eye-poppingly inexpensive.

  The idea of a space programme on the cheap was an illusion. Black Arrow could only keep Britain in the business till better things came along – and better things were not coming along. If Britain had wanted a serious satellite launcher, it should have built the Blue Streak–Black Knight combination some of the engineers had talked about; or the rival to the American Thor-Delta that they envisaged at Ansty; or simply committed itself wholeheartedly to the European launcher as the French did, hanging on through all the failures to the point of pay-off. A different decision should have been taken years before, perhaps as far back as 1960 when Blue Streak was cancelled as a nuclear missile. But to build its own full-sized launcher outside the military budget Britain would have had to give up something equally expensive – all the new universities of the 1960s, say – and space was never, for postwar Britain, going to be a national priority for which there was the will to make sacrifices. An American-made deterrent and nuclear power were going to be the technological minimum to which the British state was committed. Space was not a vital national interest. It did not, after all, deserve to have the resources mobilised that had constructed radar and the Spitfire.

  By 1971, the worldview of the engineers, with their focus on what could be done, had parted company from the outlook of policymakers, with their focus on what ought to be done. John Scott-Scott, with the other licensed dreamers of the Research Department at Ansty, had started planning a Black Arrow Mark 2. It would have had next-generation turbopumps, much higher operating pressure, and a modular structure that mated together without nuts and bolts. ‘When the ministry man came round a week or two after the launch, we made the assumption at our level that he’d come to say, “Well done, lads, now we can get this new stuff into operation.” In fact he said, “Well
done lads, please wrap the whole lot up” … We had this perhaps slightly childish view that, having come up with some new technology, the world would want it. One of the things that you learn in this game is that you might have come up with the very much better mousetrap; but then the world says, you showed you could make one mousetrap, that’s good enough. They say, you’ve shown you can do it, now go home and do something else.’ The irony is that, in their certainty that Spitfire days were over, the policymakers missed the imminent arrival of something that had nothing to do with great power status or nuclear security. When you pull back from this history, and let the lines of who knew what and who did what merge into the larger pattern, 1971 represents one of the last moments before the money that had been fired into orbit started to rain back down, multiplied. The great era of the commercial satellite was just about to begin. Within a decade, satellites would be relaying TV, phone calls, floods of data, saleable weather charts, crop information. The market would be enormous, and the French, who stuck with space as much for la gloire as from commercial calculation, would inherit an impressive piece of it. Ariane makes a hefty profit, most financial years.

  These days, some of the objects in orbit have their remotest cause in the day a teenager in Bordeaux or Nîmes read Arthur C. Clarke in translation. Once, the Space Age had equivalent roots in the provincial life of 1950s England. Because John Scott-Scott’s mother put up with the darkened bottle of peroxide in his bedroom, and Jim Scragg tramped out to the Needles on winter days in his duffle coat and bobble hat, and David Andrews took intellectual pleasure in testing things, and Roy Dommett defended the realm during the week and danced one-two-three-kick-two-three-turn-two-three at the weekend, wearing bells, and a host of other equally important people spent their working days in Nissen huts and ate prunes and custard in works canteens – because of all this, three hundred miles above your head as you read these words, Prospero still passes from darkness into light and back into the dark again every hundred minutes, circling the world in an orbit so stable that it will be up there until 2040.

  Two

  Faster than a Speeding Bullet

  3 August 1974. Compared to the Cortinas and Maxis in the car park, the prototype Concorde taxiing onto the runway at RAF Fairford looked astonishingly modern: but then, it always would. For the next quarter of a century, in any scene where it was placed, it would always be an object without parallel and so an object that stood out from its context. It would always be stylistically disconnected from the machines people build for more everyday tasks. Even now, when the car parks of Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle are filled with sleek creations that have been art-directed to the maximum by Mercedes and Renault to convey the impression of futurity, Concorde still looks as if a crack has opened in the fabric of the universe and a message from tomorrow has been poked through. Age has only made it clear that the tomorrow in question is yesterday’s tomorrow; and has shown too, of course, in the gradual revelation of the design’s practical flaws, like the vulnerability of the wings to the wheels, which brought down Air France flight 4590 in a scrawl of flame in 2000.

  Brian Trubshaw, the chief test pilot for Concorde at the British Aircraft Corporation, was at the controls, dressed in his orange flight suit. He swung the plane round and pointed it west up the tarmac. Concorde cornered smartly on its spindly undercarriage. It was quicker on the ground than other airliners, just as it took off and landed faster than them. In all its movements, Trubshaw and his colleagues and their French counterparts had learned to expect an element of hurtle, exhilarating to master. Events came at a Concorde pilot at a more adrenalised tempo. The plane would ask you to take not decision, decision, decision, but decision! decision! decision! Trubshaw liked this: it was stretching. (In the 1990s, having retired to a Cotswold village, Trubshaw sometimes nipped next door to have a go on a neighbour’s flight-simulator software, which had a Concorde module. It wasn’t the same, of course, ‘but it gives you a taste’, he said.)

  Clearance from the tower came in over the co-pilot’s headset. On the centre panel in the cockpit, all four of the indicator lights that summarised the data flow from the Olympus engines glowed green. With the wheel brakes locked, Trubshaw gently throttled up the turbines, and engaged ‘reheat’, the afterburning system which generated extra thrust by spraying fuel into the main engines’ exhaust. Then he released the brakes and the plane gave him its almost shocking acceleration. There were well over a hundred people in the flight-test team, all told – pilots, ground crew, technicians, engineers, administrators – but more often than not he was the fortunate one who got to ride up the runway in the right-hand seat of the conical cockpit, with the bigness of the plane just a sensed presence behind him, and the nose dropped so that there was nothing ahead of him but the blurring ribbon of concrete. He felt the sharp edges of the delta wing slicing the air into two flows, and the flow beneath the wing beginning to build in pressure, and building, and building, till there was enough lift for him to pull back the stick and send the Concorde 002 skywards with a grinding roar; a man at the controls of the only airliner in the world that handled like a fighter plane.

  Behind him there was jubilation. This was not a significant test flight – those were long concluded. Trubshaw was just going to fly one more standard supersonic circuit of the Bay of Biscay, where BAC and Aerospatiale had been allotted a piece of sky in which they could boom to their hearts’ content. But today wasn’t a very ordinary occasion either. Two days before, when Trubshaw was working out the logistics of a flight to Bahrain, to ‘prove the route’ for British Airways, his phone rang. It was Tony Benn, the Secretary of State for Industry. Mr Trubshaw, said Benn, I understand you’re off to Bahrain next week; is there a chance you could organise a flight for me and some of the chaps before you go? Certainly, Minister, said Trubshaw. No problem at all. But which chaps are these? Oh, said Benn, the aerospace shop stewards, of course, from the plants at Filton and Weybridge. I thought I’d bring about fifty, if you have the seats? You do? Tremendous.

  Of course, Brian Trubshaw would have said yes to any political request for a joyride. Concorde existed on sufferance. It needed constant backing to survive its constant crises. The latest one had almost killed the project. The multiplying cost of aviation fuel, that year of the oil shock, had been the last straw for the last airlines holding an option to buy Concorde; they had all dropped out. Tony Benn had been instrumental in making sure that when Labour came back into office that spring the government had nonetheless authorised a small production run of planes for the British and French national carriers. He had another claim for consideration, too. He was the MP for the Bristol constituency that contained the Filton plant, and he had been a steady friend to Concorde ever since it was first mooted. So he was owed a favour. But as it happened Brian Trubshaw actually liked this Secretary of State. As a solid, droll, politically incurious product of the RAF’s flight-test aristocracy, Trubshaw was about as likely to develop an interest in Bennite ideology as he was to sprout archangelic wings and take off from Fairford under his own power. But he approved of Benn as a person, and still more so as a rare politician who was genuinely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about aviation. ‘He had an outstanding brain,’ Trubshaw remembered twenty-six years later, when I interviewed him a few months before his death in the spring of 2001. ‘Of all the ministers, the great thing about this chap, is he understood what he was talking about.’ Benn returned the feeling. Having learned to fly in the RAF himself towards the end of the Second World War, he had glimpsed the great pyramid of pilotly repute which mounted up from humble students like himself towards the shadowy apex where the mighty test pilots belonged, men like Trubshaw and his military counterparts Roly Beaumont and Eric Brown, men who were stuffed with as much unostentatious grandeur as Chuck Yeager was over in America. When Benn met Trubshaw, he knew he was shaking the hand of someone who, in his own domain, was a prince. Benn had come happily along on many of Concorde’s earlier proving flights, including one in 1
970 when a hydraulic system failed and the plane went into ‘an uncontrollable gentle roll’. He always brought a camera so he could take his own pictures of the plane. On one occasion, he collected Trubshaw’s autograph.

  Benn had been a technocrat: almost the archetypal technocrat. He is remembered now as what he became, the quixotic extremist whose bid for the deputy leadership helped make the Labour Party unelectable in the 1980s. But he began as the nearest thing there has ever been in British politics to the bright young men the grandes écoles turn out in Paris to administer the great French state corporations. As Wilson’s Minister for Technology between 1964 and 1970, he stood for a Britain that could be at home in the modern world without needing to see it through a comforting filter of Edwardian attitudes and ideas. Whenever, during his time in office, British Rail announced the development of a new high-speed train, or the Atomic Energy Authority opened a new reactor, another steel and glass panel was added to the Britain he wanted to see built. The monument that symbolised his outlook was the Post Office Tower. He always got on well with engineers. In fact, to begin with, he thought of socialism as a way of engineering society, so that it was better, and more rational, and more efficient.