There was a brief moment, between the euphoria of victory in 1945 and the harsh lesson of Suez, when Britain harboured ambitions of becoming a power in space.

It wasn’t an unreasonable aim, given France’s subsequent success in developing a launch capability through Arianespace. In the UK, however, the scale of the effort required and a failure of nerve combined to pull the plug. The offer from the US space agency Nasa to launch UK satellites played a part. It seemed pointless to compete with a close ally with such deep pockets.

But the endeavour, though cut short, was not fruitless. The British satellite Prospero – the only one entirely built and launched by the UK – still circles the Earth in its polar orbit. When it was launched in 1971 the UK became the fifth nation to put its own satellite into orbit.

Prospero was supposed to have been called Puck, who put a girdle around the Earth in 40 minutes, but the British aerospace minister Frederick Corfield is supposed to have said that he could not trust himself to get that name right in the House of Commons, so Prospero it became.

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Prospero weighed a modest 66kg and it did very little, apart from beeping: it was Sputnik, 15 years too late. But it was also, in its way, a very British triumph. It had cost £9 million, hardly enough to buy a valve on the Saturn launchers. To call the programme economical would do a violence to language: it was miserly, financed out of Ministry of Defence petty cash. It was the bare minimum for which a small satellite could be launched into orbit.

Its launcher, Black Arrow, had a distant kinship to the V2 rockets that rained down on London in 1944. When the German rocket teams were disbanded at the end of the war the Americans got Wernher von Braun, the Russians the V2 production lines, and Britain the research the Germans had done into hydrogen peroxide as a rocket fuel.

Hydrogen peroxide is water with another oxygen atom attached. It looks exactly like water, but when concentrated sufficiently it readily disintegrates, releasing oxygen and steam at a high temperature. In this stream of heated oxygen, anything will burn: plain old paraffin in the case of Black Arrow.

This system had already proved successful in Black Knight, a rocket used to test the effects of reentry of components from suborbital flights. The data was needed for the design of Blue Streak, an intermediate-range ballistic missile Britain undertook to build as part of a joint missile programme with the US. Blue Streak was cancelled in 1960 and replaced by Polaris missiles bought from the United States.

Black Knight could not put anything into orbit, but engineers at the Royal Aircraft Establishment worked out that a three-stage rocket – the first two stages based on Black Knight and the third stage a solid-fuel rocket – could just do it. A launcher weighing 17.8 tonnes would be capable of launching a satellite weighing up to 100kg into a 300-mile orbit.

Any extra weight would have reduced the payload, while tests would cost money that simply wasn’t there. Just four launches from the Woomera range in Australia were possible. The first was a test of the first stage, and the next two failed. Meanwhile, the bean-counters were circling, ready to cancel the whole programme.

On July 29, 1971, Corfield stood up in the House of Commons and did so. By then the fourth Black Arrow was on its way to Australia, with enough cash committed for a final attempt. On October 28, after an agonising wait, all was ready.

Astonishingly, it went like a dream. Everything worked perfectly: the first stage, the second, and finally the solid-fuelled Waxwing timing their entries to the second. On the ground, the engineers pinched themselves. Could it be true?

Confirmation came from a satellite tracking station in Alaska: “We have an operational satellite overhead on 137 megahertz.” Prospero was in orbit after the cheapest and one of the neatest development programmes in the history of space.

And that was it, sadly. To have become a serious player the UK would have to have committed at least ten times as much money. The dream ended at the moment it might have begun.

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