{"id":521526,"date":"2026-04-09T14:05:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T14:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/521526\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T14:05:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T14:05:08","slug":"the-brits-made-a-rocket-what-happened-to-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/521526\/","title":{"rendered":"The Brits Made A Rocket. What Happened To It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like many long-established broadcasters, the BBC put out a selection of their archive material for us all to enjoy online. Their most recent may be of interest to Hackaday readers and has more than a bit of personal interest to your scribe, as it visits the Spadeadam rocket test range on the event of its closure in 1973<\/a>. This marked the final chapter in the story of Blue Streak, the British intercontinental missile project that later became part of the first European space launcher.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible citizens of every country see their government as uniquely talented in the throwing away of taxpayer\u2019s money, but the sad story here isn\u2019t in Blue Streak itself which was obsolete as a missile by the time it was finished. Instead it lies in the closure of the test range as part of the ill-advised destruction of a nascent and successful space industry, just as it had made the UK the third nation to have successfully placed a satellite in orbit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We normally write in the third person in our daily posts here at Hackaday, but for now there\u2019s a rare switch into the first person. My dad spent a large part of the 1950s working as a technician for de Haviland Propellers, later part of Hawker Siddeley, and then British Aerospace. He was part of the team working on Blue Streak at Spadeadam<\/a> and the other test site at RAF Westcott<\/a> in Buckinghamshire, and we were brought up on hair-raising tales of near-disasters in the race to get British nukes flying. He\u2019s not one of the guys in the video below, as by that time he was running his metalwork business in Oxfordshire, but I certainly recognise the feeling of lost potential they express. Chances are I\u2019ll never visit what remains of the Spadeadam test stands in person as the site is now the UK\u2019s electronic warfare test range, so the BBC film represents a rare chance for a closer look.<\/p>\n

In a related story, the trackers for the same program in Australia were saved from the scrapheap<\/a>.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like many long-established broadcasters, the BBC put out a selection of their archive material for us all to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-521526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}