Boris Johnson’s 'Galactic Britain'
We are going to launch BT Tower into space and travel from one solar system to another spreading promotional materials about investment opportunities in Peterborough and Slough.
UK government has published its National Space Strategy [PDF], a document full of big ideas but according to some, no new funding. A cynic might wonder if the document has more in common with the Green strategies trumpeted by the regime of current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, such is the amount of recycling contained within …
They did manage to sneak one obvious joke past the proof reader though, which is that the British military apparently has an outfit called "Space Command". ...... Pseudononymous Coward
Command of which space, that perceives and conceives and receives control of future events in all others, is no joke, PC, although whether the British military are pioneering with expertise in the field, or teasing for experts, is something which is probably not ever currently going to be mentioned publicly or outside of Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information circles. Indeed, even within such hallowed cloisters would such likely be rarely, if ever, discussed and admitted, given the advantage it grants to the worthy in the fields of specific collegiate endeavour.
And as for nabbing only 10% of that global market, it would a mistake and a bet one would lose if one was to think and not realise the private sector is more than just capable and enabling of hope ...... or if one was to not think and realise the private sector is more than just capable and enabling of hope.
The trouble with a presently politically inept blighted Blighty is it does not aspire to solely effectively lead enough and thus falls foul of all of those wannabe Caesars, with too little in the way of intelligence in their brains, being told or imagining themselves that they can and thus does it and IT and Media give rise to an unsavoury opposition and wasteful competition and forlorn hopes easily crushed and crashed and trashed.
Seems to me like one of those perfect times for the private sector to do a whole series of those can do things which you may never live long enough to know anything definitive about because it is safer for you that way.
I haven't read the document, but it surely says we'll maintain Imperial measurements in space, as Hyperdrive measures the spaceship HMS Camden Lock's speed in miles per hour.
Nothing could possibly go wrong with that.
Johnson or any other prime minister past, present and probably future have little to no understanding of technology or science, they are all about the money and whether that money will lead to votes.
Every one of the dozen PM's I have paid attention to since I was at school have made similar speechs and then leave the 'boffins' to get on with it.
Usually while cutting funds, screwing up education in the STEM subjects and appointing ministers for technology who haven't even heard of the spinning jenny.
Johnson or any other prime minister past, present and probably future have little to no understanding of technology or science, they are all about the money and whether that money will lead to votes.
Well Thatcher famously studied and worked for a period as an industrial chemist so your political memory obviously doesn't stretch that far back in time.
Thatcher worked briefly as a research chemist in the 50s before becoming a barrister so science easily took a back seat for her.
She used the little knowledge she had as a lever to get her own way with regard to her policies in regard to the sciences just as she did with everything else.
I remember reading that she regretted studying chemistry and went into law as an entry into politics, her main interest so she hardly had much regard for science and technology it was just a means to an end.
UKland *had* a sort of start towards a "space presence" in the late 1950's. They killed it to save money and because the politicians of the day were mostly trained in the "Humanities" and Law and considered offworld exploitation to be skiffy-geeky BukkRojas robots-and-rayguns stuff - as many of them still do.
Had they had vision slightly better than extreme myopia, they could have had city-farms in high Earth orbit, comet-catching industries, drop-ships fuelling the Terran economy with cheap imports and possibly even scientific outposts on the Lunar Farside by 1990 but they were simply intellectually underpowered and unable to grasp the Big Picture.
It is also true that the USAliens could have built upon their Skylabs to do much of that cheaper, faster and better than UKland could have but neither nation was interested.
Instead, we get twenty-year wars over which big daddy in the sky has the better fan-fiction.
The Dream of Stars is dead.
"Had they had vision slightly better than extreme myopia, they could have had city-farms in high Earth orbit, comet-catching industries, drop-ships fuelling the Terran economy with cheap imports and possibly even scientific outposts on the Lunar Farside by 1990 but they were simply intellectually underpowered and unable to grasp the Big Picture."
And the flying cars. Don't forget the flying cars.
Sounds like just another "de Pfeffel*" to me...
*(a "de Pfeffel" is an unpleasant release of irrelevant noise and foetid noxious gas from a disgusting type of parasite that is known to inflict members of the species known as "Humans." Further reading: see the entry for "Politicians" in the Encyclopaedia Disgustica)
This is basically just a summary of what Boris is already doing, heavily puffed up with codswallop. At best it will nudge the Chancellor's political brain cells during the next Spending Review, and can certainly only last as long as Boris, so the avowed intent to revisit it in 2030 seems a tad humorous. Still, at least it is better than the strategy which saw Black Arrow cancelled exactly fifty years ago, back in 1971.
That is unfair, even on Boris. He and his Whitehall chums have been oiling the wheels of three UK spaceports and putting real cash into space R&D, science and defence. Of course it is our cash he has been throwing out and British industry are spending it for him, but without him and his wagonload of monkeys the cash would not be going there.
I was a bit concerned about the sub-heading "Space is becoming more congested and contested".
I don't know about contested, but the bit we can see, which is 46 billion light-years across, averages only about 5 protons per cubic metre, i.e. only about 1e-42 percent of its volume is occupied, which doesn't seem very congested at all.
Yeah, it's the litter at orbital altitudes you have to get through to reach it that's the problem.
A problem that continues to grow, and isn't going to get any better any time soon. Heck, even if we invest the UK billions (wherever they're coming from) into space litter pickers, nobody's going to pay us to deploy them anyway.
Space clutter a problem?
Not really.
We have nukes. Loads and loads of nukes. We know where much of the clutter is, we can reliable put a Cassini into a highly complex set of orbits around distant Saturn so volatilising vast numbers of usless orbiting thingies should not be much of a trial.
We'd need to warn the Astronomers, radio, microwave, optical and everything up to gamma-ray, a couple of weeks before Bin-Day so they have time to switch off, shutter and schedule maintenance upon their mechanical eyes but that's just a few emails.
What a sky full of nukes would look like and what the residual detritus, debris and vapours would be is, of course, something for the "boffin" to clarify.
It should be noted that an added advantage to this scheme would be a global effort to remove left-over nukes that no-one is using and that are simply decaying in their silos. We would, for once, be getting some real return for all of the currency and man-years spent on those idiotic contraptions.
Wouldn't that be nice?
What do you mean by "Hell, no!!" :)
A high altitude electromagnetic pulse is produced when gamma rays from a nuclear weapon detonated in space hit the atmosphere, and can cause severe damage to terrestrial electronic and electronic systems across many thousands of square miles.
It is considered a major strategic threat, and you are proposing that we do it to ourselves! See attached icon.
Let's just say that space clutter would be the least of our problems if nuclear weapons are detonated in earth orbit.
You're expecting the PR and coloured pencil departments to get things right? Heh...
Including the fact that building those monsters now would be... a waste. Musk et.al. have dramatically improved the power/size ratio of rocket engines, so everybody + dog is going for the clustered, gimballed and very much throttleable/restartable/re-useable stacks.
After all, as much fun as it was to see the big fireballs of the experimental models, Musk did manage to first land his boosters, then his main stage, and finally a rather big contraption that may one day indeed become a fuly fledged spaceship. Using "small" engines. As do ESA, and all the various "upstarts" in Asia in their large fireworks.
F1's aren't needed anymore. They were meant to send the entire giant Apollo stack to the Moon in one go. Nowadays we can actually send the bits up individually for less and dock/assemble in orbit. Or, if you want to get fancy.... Starship is meant for Mars, but in my eyes makes for a mighty fine start of a Moon base with a couple of modifications...
The European supply ships for the ISS could be collected on-site to be recycled as Mars supply back-packs.
Fit a few out as human-compatible and they may even form the entirety of an Ares mission. Some spare supply pods could carry, instead of supplies for ISS, Ikea-style flat-packed bits for the missions. "Insert part A into slot V6"?
I suppose *someone* at E.S.A. thought of this? And dismissed it as stupid?
"Musk et.al. have dramatically improved the power/size ratio of rocket engines,"
Nope. Pretty much the same as it's always been. He just hasn't been charging all the market will bear. That might be why SpaceX raises an extra couple of billion each year.
SpaceX adopted the approach the USSR did with rocket engines. They went for smaller units and more of them. There's some good reasons to do it that way. The USSR did it as they couldn't get really big rocket motors to behave. It also means machinery that isn't as unique (huge) and some economy of scale as well as redundancy in use.
> F1's aren't needed anymore. They were meant to send the entire giant Apollo stack to the Moon in one go. Nowadays we can actually send the bits up individually for less and dock/assemble in orbit.
By that logic it would be cheaper to pick up your groceries one item at a time during individual trips to the store instead of on one shopping trip.
"F1's aren't needed anymore. They were meant to send the entire giant Apollo stack to the Moon in one go."
Really? Because commercial aircraft are much larger now than in the Apollo days due to the fact that the use of larger aircraft improves overall fuel efficiency and reduces man-hours for flight crews. Same reason a dump truck is used to move gravel rather than 50 or 60 trips in a Mini.
It seems very illustrative of Boris Johnson though, blabbing on about Galactic Britain while people are smacking each other in the face at fuel pumps. I'm not sure if it was out of desperation, complete lack of awareness, or he's just trolling everyone again, it's so difficult to tell with him.
all that waffle about targets and claims I can predict what will happen
Government announces X number of billions to be ploughed into UK space industries
Via various bodies/consultances/government commitees
And then the cash is distributed .. which out of the say 5 billion pledged will be about 150 million with the rest soaked up by various bodies/consultances/comittees all staffed by various government members or relatives or friends..... and some bloke who runs a pub in the village where the ministers 3rd home is
Thanks, I now have 'Bohemian Rhapsody' running around my head.
Makes about as much sense as Boris Johnson's space plans. I can only assume that he makes lots of announcements, and only the ones that generate lots of sustained praise for him are likely to get long term funding. Or am I just a cynical old git?
> ones that generate lots of sustained praise for him are likely to get long term funding
That's just not true.
None of them are going to get long term funding. Those that do generate praise will be mentioned repeatedly and the same phrases used in the next announcement.
This government is just a Markov chain spam generator.