Backroom Boys

by Francis Spufford

  The German research on HTP had been developed into a prototype engine code-named Gamma by the RAE’s sister institution, the Rocket Propulsion Establishment at Westcott. As was the British way, the scientific civil service took matters to the proof-of-concept stage, to show that investment would be worthwhile, and then the contracts to build the different parts of Black Knight were spread around the private sector. A certain amount of tension was inevitable between the civil service engineers and the company ones. A Royal Aircraft Establishment spec for a project left most of the detailed creativity still to be done. Reminded that the RAE had ‘designed’ his share of Black Knight, one aerospace boss cried, ‘Yes! And I have here the very envelope with the design on the back!’ Contractors and research establishments alike, though, handled the work through very small groups of people: a few tens, or at the very most a couple of hundred, including draughtsmen and machinists to keep the cycle by which designs turned into objects tight. Surprisingly, the smallness of the enterprise was not a handicap. Although the British companies were absurdly undercapitalised compared to their American equivalents, and would vanish as the aviation market became global, it turns out that rocket-building is a pursuit that rather suits cottage industries. ‘The Americans always tended to think we couldn’t do it because we were small,’ says Roy Dommett, who remembers trips to the States on which he was introduced to specialist after specialist in separate, tiny aspects of rocket construction. Back in England, all those functions would be combined in a few individuals who aimed to cover a whole field. Dave Wright is a historian with the British Rockets Oral History Project at Manchester University. He points to the social difference between the British and American industries: the Americans had already moved to a model in which engineering graduates controlled mass production, while British companies were still recruiting through apprenticeships and training school-leavers in the particular micro-culture of a firm. ‘The engineers on the shop floor had craft skills to a much higher degree than their American equivalent. What the Americans did have was the capacity to mobilise people to run off thousands of aircraft. The British weren’t really in that kind of business. But producing sixty rockets is hardly mass production, and by having people who were proud of what they were doing, the British were getting the kind of quality that was needed without the sophisticated quality control methods that were being used in America.’

  The contract for the rocket motor went to Armstrong Siddeley, and the job of creating Black Knight’s structure and fuselage and control systems was put out to Saunders-Roe Ltd on the Isle of Wight. Like many of Britain’s small aviation companies, Saunders-Roe was based where an Edwardian aeroplane enthusiast had set up his workshop – in their case, where the flying boat business could be conducted conveniently close to the Cowes regatta. By the 1950s, Saunders-Roe was no longer coach-building beautiful, varnished hulls. They had moved on to experiments with mixedpowerplant fighter aircraft, but the ethos of craftsmanship still remained. Jim Scragg joined Saunders-Roe as an apprentice and retired from it forty-odd years later as manager of their rocket activities. He remembers working on Black Knight in a design office which had once been the stables of Osborne House. The exercise yard was glassed over, and in the centre were draughtsmen at their draughting boards, with a ring of ‘thinkers’ at desks around them passing in instructions, and furthest back, the managers in their glass cubicles surveying the whole panopticon. The Saunders-Roe designers travelled up to Westcott to examine the motor. Then they worked backward from the motor’s consumption of kerosene and HTP to the size of the tanks, and the properties of the airframe, and the electrical circuitry that would be needed. Black Knights were actually fabricated in an assembly shop, where the sections of aluminium tube waited on their side in jigs to be mated together with the pieces of the mechanism. Saunders-Roe used Pickford’s to move items of heavy equipment, but the rocket components themselves were delicate, and when a Black Knight was completed it was transported in a special shock-absorbing, air-breathing, thirty-three-foot crate designed for the purpose. A company film about Black Knight exists, of the kind that is only familiar now in the parody form of the Mercury adverts. It is stiff-voiced, immune to irony, and (in a quiet way) ragingly proud of the product. It shows a crated Black Knight being driven westwards past Carisbrooke Castle, ‘where Charles I was imprisoned’, to the High Down test site on the chalk cliffs near the Needles. The sky is the blue of a sunny day at the seaside, the turf is short and springy. Everything is filmed in the innocent Technicolor of an advert for vanilla ice cream.

  Saunders-Roe had built a ferroconcrete replica of the launch area at Woomera, with an underground control centre in the bunkers of a battery from the Napoleonic wars. They fuelled each Black Knight with its full load of HTP and kerosene, and fired them just as at Woomera, except that a steel claw in the floor of the gantry gripped a ball in the motor bay of the rocket and prevented it from reaching the portion of outer space directly above the Solent. Cameras in the exhaust duct below the gantry relayed the view straight up the throats of the rocket chambers as they burned. For a long time, in fact, the test technicians at Saunders-Roe were the only people to know what a Black Knight looked like fired in daylight. (At Woomera, for security reasons, they were always launched at night, and all that the controllers saw was a rising white star.) There were few flames; certainly not the molten ocean of fire you see billowing round a space-shuttle launch. Black Knight only burned one part of kerosene to eight of HTP, so only one ninth of the exhaust gas was burnt hydrocarbons. The rest was steam and CO2. ‘All you see’, says Jim Scragg, ‘is a shock diamond, where the different flows of the exhaust interfere with one another, and it gives you this pattern specific to rockets of a diamond, or a series of diamonds. As the exhaust gets further away from the chamber, it gets cooler, and therefore it becomes white, and then yellow, and red. I don’t know if you’ve got any socks with diamonds on them, but that’s exactly what it looks like.’ From a Cunard liner on the way into Southampton, you could see a plume of steam from the exhaust duct jetting out horizontally over the sea.

  Between 1958 and 1965, twenty-two Black Knights flew successfully at Woomera, testing re-entry bodies in metal, silica, asbestos and any number of weird laminates. ‘Each one had its own character,’ recalls Jim Scragg fondly. ‘They all had their own little quirks like the motor cars you’ve owned in your life had their own little quirks.’ Even though they were built to be destroyed, it was not always easy saying goodbye to objects on which such care had been expended. John Scott-Scott remembers the malignant transformation that had taken place when the fragments of fired Black Knights were returned to Ansty for analysis. ‘What was once precision machinery came back as a heap of junk. It always struck me as very sad. They were full of red sand …’

  Meanwhile, an entirely different group, not of engineers but of pure scientists, had taken NASA up on the offer of a free launch for a British research satellite. They escorted their Ariel-1 out to Cape Canaveral to see it safely on its way aboard an American missile. This was the time described by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, when the strip of motels and hamburger joints along Cocoa Beach became a playground for astronauts who loved ‘Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving and Driving & the rest.’ ‘At night the pool areas of the motels became like the roaring fraternity house lounge of Project Mercury … and what lively cries and laughter would be rising up on all sides as the silvery moon reflected drunkenly in the chlorine blue of the motel pools!’ Something of this spirit must have seeped into the scientists, because they called London and requested permission to hire a car. Picture it: the scientists hurtling along Highway A1A in the tumescent Florida night, daringly dressed in shirtsleeves. In a car with fins! No, said London. Rent bicycles.

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  Putting a satellite into orbit using the Black Knight technology was possible, but only just possible. A rocket’s range is determined by the final velocity it reaches. If you want a ballistic missile to fly 2,500 kilometr
es, you have to accelerate it to around five kilometres per second. If you can get it moving at just under 8 km/sec, it will fall perpetually around the earth at the height you lifted it to: orbit. The tariff goes on rising from there. To escape from the earth’s gravity altogether requires about 11 km/sec, to go to the moon 18 km/sec. How do you pay the tariff? The equation governing final velocity links the performance of the rocket engine and the rocket’s weight at take-off. This is why the present-day quest for cheaper spaceflight is causing intense inquiry into better fuels and different chamber designs, such as the ‘aerospike’ engine. Without improvement in the engine performance, the take-off weight rises, not proportionately but exponentially, as the demand on the machine increases. An ICBM weighs ten metric tonnes; the Saturn V weighed almost 1,200 tonnes. In the research study that led to the funding being granted for the Black Arrow launcher, the scientists at the RAE calculated that HTP/kerosene engines could reach an orbit 300 miles high if a three-stage vehicle was used. The first two stages would be like stretched, more powerful Black Knights, and the third stage would be a solid-fuel rocket, in effect a cunningly shaped blob of plastic explosive to be fired just before the payload reached the top of its natural parabola, so that it sailed away around the earth instead of dropping back. But if the take-off weight were to be kept small – and Black Arrow was the smallest fully controllable satellite launcher ever built – the payload would have to be tiny in proportion.

  The RAE blueprint envisaged a 17.8 tonne rocket delivering a maximum of 100 kg of satellite into orbit. In other words, the payload of a Black Arrow would be only 0.56 per cent of its total weight, a fact with stringent consequences for the design. Most rockets suffer a creeping increase of weight during the development process, as engineers have good ideas and problems are solved. Black Arrow could not, or the payload capacity might be eliminated altogether. Nor could it follow the mainstream design doctrine of ‘redundancy’, in which you ensure the success of a rocket which will be beyond the reach of repair and adjustment from the moment it is launched by building in fail-safes and backup systems. Black Arrow could not afford the weight of back-ups. Instead, it was constructed for ‘minimum criticality’, which means trying to design out everything that could go wrong. You think through all the possible catastrophes and then, one by one, prevent the sequences of events that would lead up to each of them. Ideally, the only sequence left is the one in which events run just as planned. The ideal could not be achieved – the aim was minimum criticality, not zero criticality – yet the constant effort towards it was the discipline which would preserve Black Arrow’s 0.56 per cent of useful cargo.

  So much for the how of Black Arrow. The why is more elusive. The official rationale for the project begged more questions than it answered. Sir Morien Morgan, the Director of the RAE, gave it when the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology questioned him six years later. ‘I regard these small rockets’, he said, ‘in very much the same way I regard simulators and wind tunnels …’ Black Arrow was an ‘experimental tool’ for the nascent British satellite industry. It existed, said Sir Morien, so that they could test ‘small bits of experimental hardware’ in a zero-g environment. It was certainly true that Black Arrow was only good for research: in the late 1960s a working communications satellite massed at least 300 kg and needed to be put into an energy-expensive geostationary orbit. It was far beyond the modest capabilities of Black Arrow to launch one of these sizeable chunks of telephone exchange. So Black Arrow was undoubtedly research apparatus rather than a plausible workhorse. But why should British satellite makers, like the innovative unit at the University of Surrey, need a British launcher to test their products, when NASA’s offer of free rides to orbit had become a standing, open invitation? A satellite industry needed someone, somewhere to be building launchers, but they did not have to share a nationality. In fact, the technology of a launcher and the technology of a satellite were virtually unrelated. One was turbopumps and volatile liquids; the other was solar cells and micro-relays. So the satellite makers did not have much to learn from Black Arrow, and over the thirty years since, when Britain has built no launchers at all, they have thrived or failed entirely according to their skill at negotiating the changing conditions of their own industry. Specialised machines for the zero-g environment have continued to emerge from the filtered air of Clean Rooms around Britain. They have flown in earth orbit and far beyond, to survey the planets, rendezvous with comets, and probe the mysteries of the heliopause. At the end of 2003 the Open University’s Beagle 2 lander will touch down on the surface of Mars. Black Arrow was inessential to this whole history.

  There might, quietly, have been a military purpose. It might have been useful if Britain had been able to send small, discreet packages aloft by a route that the Americans did not oversee. The special relationship with Washington was a fine thing, but it was always worth seeking out those little areas of operational independence that would adjust the terms of the intelligence contract to Britain’s advantage. Knowing things that your ally does not ensures that you are a valuable partner. The origin of the very first funding cheque for Black Arrow in the bowels of the Ministry of Defence suggests that somebody was considering the enticing prospect of spy satellites producing purely British signals intelligence; sigint that could be shared or not, at choice, during those long conversations across the polished conference tables of Langley, Virginia.

  Conversely, many of the rocketmen themselves were attracted to Black Arrow precisely because it was not a weapon. British rocketry was such a small world that there was never a chance for a wholly civil branch of it to be established. The same people worked on civil and military rockets by turns. They were conscientious men, committed to the defence of Britain, who were going to be relieved to find at the end of the Cold War they had not spent their working lives procuring the end of the world. They preferred working on space to working on nuclear weapons, when there was the chance of it, because space was more innocent. For the world of non-warlike endeavour that the lucky engineers of NASA occupied, spin-off from the Cold War though it was, they felt a certain wistfulness, and Black Arrow took them closer to it than any other British project. John Scott-Scott remembers the lectures in the plant at Ansty by invited space gurus. ‘It kept us very fired up. Getting into real space one day had to be the better thing to do than just sending something to the enemy’s country, if it had to be.’

  But why was there the wider backing in 1965 without which even a very few million pounds does not flow out of government? Perhaps here we need the idea of cultural momentum. The expectation of the BIS in their wartime pub that a country like Britain would of course go into space had not vanished all at once. It began from too profound an experience of technological acceleration during the war for that to happen; it slid onwards through the postwar years, losing credibility gradually, less and less attuned to a people who had had enough of eating rationed potatoes to pay for war machines. The British science-fiction writer Stephen Baxter experiments with alternative histories in which things worked out differently. He trained at the RAE, where he worked beside the engineers who’d gathered up V2 fragments in 1944 with forensic awe, and he broods on the postwar mood. ‘Maybe we became more content – post-imperial, in a way post-industrial, almost bucolic – and you don’t associate that with a space programme. Nevertheless, we had one, because of the residue from the war.’ He laughs. ‘I think people did expect that one day an old Spitfire pilot would fly into orbit, you know, pipe clutched inside his space-suit helmet.’

  Consider the popular culture of the 1950s. In the pages of the Eagle comic for boys, Dan Dare conquered the solar system wearing something that looked very much like an RAF uniform. Theoretically, his International Space Force was a global outfit, but ‘Hank’ and ‘Pierre’ had bit-parts, and Sir Hubert called the shots. ‘Eee, I wish I’d stayed in Wigan,’ quavered Digby, as they confronted the green-skinned hordes of Mekonta, menacing capital of Northern Venus. B
y the mid-1960s, this fantasy of flying Spitfires to other planets had almost faded away. The space enthusiasm of British children was focused on the Space Age’s obvious capital, Cape Kennedy, where the race to the moon made merely orbital adventures look out of date. The Zooms and Sky-Ray lollies that the rocketmen bought their children on August afternoons in suburbia referred to archetypal rockets, and therefore to the rockets of the United States. Faithfully, the Eagle published a double-page spread about Black Arrow in January 1965, with cutaway drawings and a background of stars. Its schoolboy readership was changing, and it closed before Black Arrow was built. The naive dream of Britain in space had become a ghost, a shadow. But it was still there, the momentum was not quite exhausted, and there was, as there had always been, a secret connection between the dream and the real programme at Ansty and the Isle of Wight. The prospect of Mekonta depended secretly on the engineers. So long as something was still happening, no matter how modest, a path could still be imagined that led from the present by many obscure twists and turns to the future in which a squadron leader drank tea on the moon; or to a future of realistic advantage for British companies. All the possible futures depended on a starting-point in the present. To sustain the work of the engineers was to prevent the whole fan of futures from disappearing. No bucks, no Buck Rogers. No dosh, no Dan Dare.