George Kerevan: Rekindle scientific romance for a brighter future

Published on Wednesday 15 July 2009 21:58

WHO was the first man on the Moon? You may have been told it was Neil Armstrong but you'd be wrong. True, Neil got there on 20 July, 1969, 40 years ago this Saturday. But the Brits got there long before that.

The first two – Messrs Cavor and Bedford – arrived in 1901, courtesy of HG Wells's novel, The First Men in the Moon. In Tsarist Russia, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was busy being the first to predict that rockets would be the means to get into space, but Cavor used a different technology – "cavorite". This was a substance that shielded off gravity, allowing Cavor and Bedford, his money man, to literally float to the lunar surface in a capsule Armstrong would have recognised. There they encounter the Selenites (whom a prescient Cavor christened "Moonies").

However, late Victorian England was not taken with Cavor planting a Union flag on the Moon. This could have had something to do with Wells novel of three years earlier, The War of the Worlds, which suggested that trying to extend the Empire spacewards might provoke retaliation.

Most of Wells's scientific romances were thinly disguised critiques of British imperialism – then at its height. This agenda might explain why Wells – unlike the other father of science fiction, Jules Verne – shows scant interest in his novels in advanced technology, despite being a trained scientist.

Cavor and Bedford's visit to the Moon took place during the last great age of British exploration. A few years later, in 1912, Captain Scott would perish trying to beat the Norwegians to the South Pole. Scott became a hero by failing. Amundsen got to the Pole first by having better kit. At this point in history something happened to the British approach to technology – which explains a lot about Britain's abdication from the space race.

True, Britain was the workshop of the world and the Clyde supplied much of the hardware – ships, maritime engines, locomotives, and (by the First World War) aircraft engines. But this was a Britain dominated by its Empire and its technology was subservient to providing imperial communications and imperial trade. In America, with its huge empty spaces and small population, technology became a necessity for saving labour and boosting productivity.

America fell in love with engineering, which is why the Wright brothers (and sister) got off the ground in 1903. And why, after reading Wells's War of the Worlds in 1899, 16-year-old Robert Goddard of Worcester, Massachusetts decided to build a rocket to go to Mars. A little over two decades later, Goddard launched the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket, the precursor of the technology that got Armstrong to the Moon.

After the First World War, as the world rushed towards depression, British industry abandoned technological advance in favour of protectionism. The City banks, geared to imperial trading rather than industrial investment, happily approved. Clydeside abandoned making aircraft engines – what ordinary individual would want to be an airline passenger? Yes, Britain would have Spitfires to defeat the Luftwaffe in 1940, but they were a hand-crafted, racing car technology – the product of an elitist society.

In America they mass produced planes like they mass produced everything else. The names of the great American aircraft pioneers – Douglas, Curtiss, Martin, Lockheed, McDonnell – will give you a clue as to their cultural origins. Douglas would build the third stage of the Saturn rocket that took Armstrong to the Moon.

And so it was that Britain was left to dream of the Moon but not actually take any steps to get there, except in fiction. But these dreams were in Technicolor. In 1947, an ex-RAF radar technician by the name of Arthur C Clarke wrote a book entitled Prelude to Space, about the preparations for the first moon flight – British, of course. In post-war, austerity Britain, Clarke let his vivid imagination design the atomic-powered, two-stage Prometheus. The Beta stage of Prometheus flies into orbit with the winged Alpha upper stage – just like the current Space Shuttle.

Britain went space crazy in the 1950s. For that generation, space was the new frontier where declining Britain could be great again. Dan McGregor Dare fought the Mekon. And on 26 October, 1953, eight million people gathered round their radio sets to listen as Captain Jet Morgan (played by Andrew Faulds) became the first man to land on the Moon, set in a not-so-distant 1965. Morgan was the hero of a long-running space soap opera, Journey into Space, written by Charles Chilton.

But in the real world of 1957, the year of the first Sputnik, the Tory Government cancelled Britain's advanced aircraft projects, in order to save cash. In 1960, they finished the job by cancelling the military version of the Blue Streak missile. We ended up with Polaris – a rocket built by Lockheed.

And so Britain did not go into space. In fiction, it was the time of Quatermass, a British rocket scientist who is forced against his will to work for incompetrent civil servants. When an ancient Martian spacecraft is dug up in Knightsbridge, no-one listens to Quatermass and London is obliterated. Quatermass marked the end of British scientific optimism as well as petrifying the nation. In America, Star Trek arrived to boldly go where no man had gone before. Armstrong went there in 1969.

Blue Streak soldiered on as the British end of a European space programme, but the Wilson government eventually pulled the plug. You can still see one in the Museum of Flight, at East Fortune – a forlorn reminder of what might have been.

Britain tried to escape industrial decline by inventing consumer debt, irresponsible banks and an unsustainable housing boom. We are now living in the wreckage. To earn a proper living, we are going to have to go back to making things. To do that, we need to rediscover the romance of engineering.