A very special relationship: NASA, BIS and the race to the moon

More years back than I care to remember I met a British satellite engineer who was part of a team investigating a loose component rattling around its latest project...which unfortunately was already in Earth orbit. By rolling the satellite via its attitude thrusters they hoped to discover the nature of the problematic item, which I glibly suggested might have been an absent-minded engineer's lunchbox. I don't believe my idea was followed up and as it was, I never did find out the outcome. Answers on a postcard, please!

The relevance of this anecdote is that as discussed in an earlier post on boffins, it's often been said that Britain stopped technologically trailblazing some decades back. Now, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, newly-released material suggests the pipe-smoking 'backroom boys' might have played a more pivotal role in astronautics than has been generally made public. Some aviation experts consider the fabled TSR2 strike aircraft (envisioned in 1956 and cancelled a decade later) as the last project where Britain took the lead, but the most recently released FoI records offer tantalising evidence otherwise.

I realise this idea requires concrete evidence, but we have to remember that despite tiny budgets by American standards, Britain is the original home of numerous technological advances, from the Hawker Harrier 'jump' jet to the hovercraft. And never forget that the USA has never developed a supersonic airliner in the forty-plus years since Concorde first flew. One reason the UK has apparently failed to keep up could be that transatlantic politics have overridden the applied science. For example, the satellite engineer mentioned above also worked on the 1980's fiasco known as Project Zircon, a British military satellite that was cancelled allegedly due to skyrocketing costs (there's sort of a jest in there, if you look hard enough). But what if an additional, if not real primary reason, was pressure from the US Government? There have been hints over the years that the European Launch Development Organisation, a predecessor of the European Space Agency, was forced to cancel its remote-controlled space tug project as NASA (and therefore the White House) deemed it too advanced and therefore a potential competitor. So if post-war British technology has been deemed a commercial or security risk to the USA, might the latter have applied pressure to cancel the project or even take over the research, lock, stock and blueprint?

This might sound far-fetched, but many a former British security officer's memoirs have mentioned that the 'special relationship' between the two nations has led the UK to kowtow to the USA on numerous occasions. This ranges from automatically offering new military-biased technology such as signals intelligence software to the US, through to diverting national security listening resources to US-specified targets at the drop of a hat. So might it be possible that political pressure rather than rising costs and technological failures has caused the cancellation of advant-garde projects, or even that the US has unfairly appropriated British high-tech wizardry?

The main thrust of this post (pun on its way) concerns the Apollo/Saturn spacecraft and rocket system (geddit now?) and how the US apparently single-handedly managed to achieve a moon landing less than a decade after the start of manned spaceflight. After all, if you consider that the Saturn V was a completely reliable, purpose-built civilian launch vehicle, unlike earlier manned spacecraft which had relied on adapted ballistic missiles, and in addition was far larger and more powerful than any previous American rocket, it seems incredible how quickly the project came together. Also, one of the chief designers was Wernher von Braun, an idealistic dreamer whose primary life-long interest appears to have been a manned mission to Mars and who a decade before Apollo had been developing plans for 160-foot long rocket ships carrying crews of twenty astronauts! Even the doyen of technology prophets Arthur C. Clarke was sceptical that NASA could achieve President Kennedy's goal for a manned moon landing before 1970.

In which case, I hear you ask, how did Project Apollo succeed so magnificently, especially when the N1, the USSR's equivalent, pretty much failed to escape the launchpad? It wasn't with the help of alien technology, that's for sure. At this point it is worth going back into Clarke's past. In 1937 the Technical Committee of the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), of which Clarke was twice chairman, began a study for a manned moon landing mission. The launch vehicle was comparatively modest compared to Saturn V and the N1, utilising tiers of several thousand small solid-fuel rockets, each step being akin to the later real-life launch vehicle stages. Then in 1949, knowledge of the German V-2 rockets (in which Wernher von Braun had played a key role) led the BIS team to switch to liquid-fuelled engines.

But if the rocket seems highly impractical to modern eyes*, the manned component of the BIS scheme was remarkable for its similarity to NASA hardware, being a combination of the Apollo CMS and LM craft. Many of its features are fundamentally identical to the real thing, from carbon dioxide scrubbers to landing parachutes. Even the EVA suits bear a striking similarity to the NASA design, albeit using less advanced materials. The only big difference I can see was the lack of an onboard computer in the BIS design: hardly surprising, considering the first programmable electronic computer, the room-sized Colossus at Bletchley Park, didn't become operational until 1944 (beat that, ENIAC!) I assume the poor navigator would be stuck with a slide rule instead, provision having been made in the ship's larder for coffee to keep them awake.

*Since then, real launch vehicles have used the modular approach, including the private company OTRAG in the 1970s and '80s and even the Saturn V's predecessors, Saturn 1 and 1B, which used a cluster of eight boosters around the core of the first stage.

But the moon landing project wasn't totally restricted to paper: several instruments were actually built, including an inertial altimeter and a coelostat that was demonstrated at the Science Museum in London. The competence of the Technical Committee members shouldn't be underestimated, as in addition to Arthur C. Clarke they included A.V. Cleaver (another sometime BIS chairman) and R.A. Smith, both of whom later worked on British military rocket and missile projects.

The British boffin's ultimate pipe dream

It might not appear convincing that these British speculations could have been converted into NASA blueprints, but a combination of carrot and stick during the dark, paranoid days of the Cold War might have been enough to silence the BIS team's complaints at the appropriation of their work. After all, the project generated a lot of attention even before the Second World War, with coverage in Time Magazine and a visit from a presumed Nazi agent in 1939.

What's more, by the early 1950s Clarke was communicating with now US-based ex-V-2 rocketeers von Braun and Hermann Oberth, whilst R.A. Smith's son later worked for NASA on the Apollo programme! There is even an intriguing suggestion that the very idea of launching early satellites on adapted military missiles (a technique utilised by both the USA and USSR) was promoted in the former country by Alexander Satin, then chief engineer of the Air Branch of the Office of Naval Research, US Navy, after he witnessed a satellite project at the 1951 Second Astronautical Congress in London. And of course, that project's team included Clarke and Cleaver; the space community in those days must have been rather on the small side.

Despite the organisation's name, there have been many American BIS members over the decades, including senior NASA figures such as Dr. Kurt Debus, Director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center during the 1960s; and Gerald Griffin, a Lead Flight Director during the Apollo programme. NASA's primary contractors for Apollo were equally staffed with BIS members, including Grumman's project manager for the Lunar Module (LM), Joseph Gavin Jr. I'm not suggesting that every blivet and gubbins (to use Clarkian terms) on the BIS lunar ship was directly translated into NASA hardware, but the speed with which Project Apollo succeeded, especially compared to the USSR's failure despite its' initial head start, smacks of outside assistance. For an example of how rapidly NASA contractors appear to have cobbled together their designs, Thomas Kelly, Grumman's LM Chief Design Engineer, admitted he was one of only two employees working on LM designs for several years leading up to the NASA-awarded contract in 1962.

In addition to the BIS material, there are X-Files style hints that the British Government was making strides of a more nuts-and-bolts nature with its own lunar landing programme. In 1959 the UK's rocket launch site in Woomera, Australia, appears to have begun construction of a launch pad capable of handling the two- and three-stage man-rated rockets then under development by various British aerospace consortiums, the most prominent of which included winged orbiters akin to more recent NASA lifting body designs. (Incidentally, five UK companies at the time were involved in spacesuit development, with the final Apollo EVA suit owing a lot to the undergarment cooling system developed in the UK.)

Just to put a spanner in the works, one negative piece of evidence for my technology censorship hypothesis is that NASA clearly took no notice of the BIS crew menu. Even after Apollo 11 large strides in technology continued to be made, but the work of the food technologists was not amongst them: all Apollo astronauts lost weight and suffered electrolyte imbalance, which clearly would not have happened if they had stuck to the wholesome fare - ham and cheese sandwiches, porridge, and the like - envisioned by the British boffins. It's a shame that their health temporarily suffered, but at least Neil Armstrong and co. could take music cassettes of everyone from Dvorak to the Beatles on their journeys; imagine being stuck in a small cabin with scratchy recordings of Flanagan and Allen or Vera Lynn...

The British boffin: an extinct species?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning of the word 'boffin' is a person engaged in scientific research, frequently of a military nature. For the minority of Britons who still recognise the expression it often conjures up a time and a place, an evocation of Britain during the third quarter of the 20th century. Despite the Cold War, that era seems to have possessed a profound interconnection between societal and technological progress, a far cry from the frequent mistrust of science apparent today. From the Second World War until the 1970's these 'back-room wizards' were a familiar element of British society, sporting slide rules, briar pipes (women don't get much of a look-in for this genre), and a fondness for acronyms. Although the period saw great improvements in many aspects of applied science, from medicine to agriculture, it is largely aeronautical and astronautical projects that seem synonymous with the age of the boffin. Another curious aspect is that despite the military leanings of many boffin-run projects, the breed does not seem to have been of a more martial aspect than any other type of scientist or engineer.

One of the last gasps of boffinicity was Project Mustard, a prototypical example of scientific and technical genius combined with political and economic naivety. In the mid-1960's the Ministry of Aviation gave the British Aircraft Corporation financial support in the design of the Multi Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device (or MUSTARD), a reusable spaceplane that pre-empted the Space Shuttle. Although the intention was to make manned spaceflight much cheaper than via expendable rockets, it seems incredible that Britain could seriously consider such a project without American support. As it was, Project Mustard got little further than the drawing board and several patents filed in 1967.

The project existed at the tail end of several decades when many aspects of science and technology had becoming increasingly integrated into popular culture. British films of the 1940's and 50's fictionalised real-life boffins such as Spitfire designer R.J. Mitchell (in the First of the Few) and the bouncing bomb inventor Barnes Wallis (of Dambusters fame), whilst furniture and fabrics utilised designs based on molecular biology and the atom. Due to American isolationism Britain managed to almost independently develop nuclear power stations and atomic bombs, along with the first commercial jet airliner (the de Havilland Comet), practical hovercraft and VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) technology, the latter being a rare post-war reversal whereby the USA bought from Britain. All this was achieved in spite of being the world's largest debtor and the sudden termination of Lend-Lease in 1945; perhaps the threat of a Soviet invasion aided productivity, but the level of British 'firsts' from the period is truly astonishing.

Unfortunately, beneath the surface there was an awful lot of hype. As early as the 1951 Festival of Britain the British economy was jokingly compared to that festival's Skylon structure, in that neither possessed a visible means of support. Throughout the 1950's and 60's financial shortfalls meant that research and development (and recalling the OED definition, in the Cold War that was frequently synonymous with the military) projects, were often obsolete prior to completion. Amongst the victims of financial problems, rapidity of technological progress, political prevarication, and even pressure from the USA (perish the thought), were the Bluestreak ballistic missile and its successors, mixed powerplant interceptors, and TSR-2, a strike aircraft that was impressive even by today's standards. The most farcical moment of all came in 1957 when Defence Minister Duncan Sandys published a white paper declaring that the future of aerial warfare lay solely in guided missiles. The Doctor Beeching-style cuts that followed led to the amalgamation or disappearance of most British aerospace companies and you would have thought, any pretension of Britain competing with the superpowers.

But the boffins weren't beaten yet. Whether it was too much boy's own science fiction (from radio's Journey into Space to comic hero Dan Dare) or even a desire to replace the rapidly disintegrating Empire with the conquest of outer space, private and public sector funding repeatedly initiated space-orientated projects that stood little chance of coming to fruition. In a joint venture with the forerunners of ESA (the European Space Agency), the Black Arrow rocket was used in 1971 for the only wholly-British satellite launch, Prospero X-3. Unfortunately this occurred three months after the project was cancelled, the irony being that the British technology involved proved more reliable than its French and German counterparts. Since then, British funding of joint space ventures has been desultory to say the least, only contributing about half of what France or Germany give to ESA.

All in all, it could be said that the day of the boffin is over. A turning point may be found in the environmental concerns over Concorde in the mid-1970's, leading to the project being recognised as an economic catastrophe. The high-technology failures represented in the disaster movies of the time are the antithesis of the glorification of machinery displayed in Thunderbirds less than a decade earlier. The seemingly Victorian notion that bigger, faster (and louder) equates to progress had been replaced by an understated, almost apologetic air surrounding research and development, even for projects of a primarily civilian nature. Not that this change of attitude initially had much effect on the military: more than half of Government R&D expenditure in the 1980's went to the Ministry of Defence, including the infamous (and cancelled) spy satellite, Project Zircon.

Two more examples from the eighties prove that any space-orientated scheme would now have to undergo prompt and rigorous economic assessment. British Aerospace's Spacelab experiment pallets for ESA were extremely successful, but let's face it; this was a relatively dull project by any standard. The antithesis was another acronym-laden project: HOTOL, the Horizontal Take-Off and Landing pilotless spaceplane, which received Government funding in the mid-eighties. Unfortunately, the potential two or more decade development schedule, combined with an estimated total cost of around £5 billion and lack of MoD interest (the revolutionary engine design being classified), led to the withdrawal of official involvement after several years.

All of the above suggests that twentieth-century Britain had a tradition of wasting vast amounts of time, energy, and occasionally public money, on paper-only projects ranging from blue-sky thinking to the genuinely hare-brained. Yet some schemes show more than an element of genius. In the 1930's, members of the British Interplanetary Society developed a manned lunar lander mission that foreshadowed many elements of Project Apollo to an astonishing degree. Whereas teams in Germany and the USA were developing liquid-fuelled rockets at the time, British law prohibited rocket-building by private citizens. Perhaps this aided the notion that projects on the drawing board were as valuable as those involving nuts and bolts; thus the image of the boffin as slightly detached from politico-economic reality was born.

A recent project that could claim identification with the boffin model was Beagle 2, a shoestring-budgeted Mars lander jointly funded by the private and public sectors and combining the talents of academics and industry under the exceedingly boffin-like Colin Pillinger. The acronym-heavy craft proved where the project's sympathies lay, ranging from a robotic arm called the PAW (Payload Adjustable Workbench) to its PLanetary Undersurface TOol, or PLUTO.

With follow-up Beagle 3 cancelled in 2004 after the disappearance and presumed destruction of its predecessor, you might think that would be the final nail in the boffin coffin (groan). But the HOTOL designers have been quietly beavering away for the last few decades and a new project has risen from the ashes of the original. Skylon, a spaceplane named after the 1951 Festival of Britain structure, received a boost last year from a £900,000 ESA contribution towards its £6m million SABRE (Synergic Air BReathing Engine) research project. Initially unmanned, the craft even has the potential of housing a cabin for up to forty passengers. With an estimated first flight around 2020 the project offers hope of a cheaper reusable spacecraft, but a combination of the current economic downturn and the history of similar projects do not bode well; estimates suggest that even the British military will face budget cuts of eleven to twenty-five percent over the next six years.

So what next for boffindom? International collaboration on the aerospace and astronautics front is obviously the only way forward for Britain, but whether the tradition of idealistic, even eccentric, inventor / designer / engineers can prevail is anyone's guess. Recent news stories mention boffins at CERN (home to the Large Hadron Collider) and even in Japan (where they have successfully bred transparent animals, no less), but for me the archetypal boffin will always be British and skyward-looking, regardless of whether they smoke a briar pipe or not.

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