Daniel Sharp

One of a new generation of British aerospace writers finding fertile ground in the realm of cancelled aerospace projects (of which there are many), Dan Sharp has produced a fascinating book detailing the development work carried out by English Electric during the 1950s and 1960s on a British reusable space launch system.

In the spirit of Ernest Bevin's 1946 opinion of the atomic bomb ("We've got to have this thing over here whatever it costs.... We've got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it") and also carrying a whiff of the fictional Professor Bernard Quatermass' "British Rocket Group" (from BBC TV and later cinema outings) and the Dan Dare comic strip, many minds in post-war Britain were turned to the "white heat of technology" long before Harold Wilson made this a national priority.

One of the companies at the cutting edge of the new technologies was English Electric. Pre-war, the company had been a major equipment manufacturer and had developed into a provider of electric railway rolling stock; in 1938 it took on a "shadow" aviation contract to build aircraft in its Preston works. Other contracts followed, and the company opened a design office to handle modifications to aircraft to bring them to production. By the war's end, they were in a position to contest for the design, development and construction of the new advanced jet aircraft designs then starting to appear. Their name became synonymous with the Jet Age with their manufacture of the Canberra bomber and the Mach 2 Lightning interceptor aircraft.

In 1953, military planners were beginning to look beyond the V-bomber force then in development to the next stage - hypersonic aircraft, designed for sustainable flight at speeds beyond Mach 5. English Electric were given contracts to explore the design problems associated with such machines, and the projects that arose from that were to occupy their development teams until 1968, when the British project - by then known as 'Mustard' - was finally cancelled. Even then, the project teams continued work on possible collaboration with the Americans on the Space Shuttle, until 1972 when it was decided that the Shuttle would be an all-American project.

This book goes into considerable detail on the various British projects and proposals. It also looks at projects from other British aerospace companies and from Europe. The book is copiously illustrated with declassified English Electric drawings showing the vehicles proposed, often in some degree of detail (suggesting that tooling for production was always considered a possibility, even though ultimately no metal was to be cut on any of the vehicles described).

The preamble to the English Electric story is also quite interesting; the story is told of Operation Backfire, the British Army's test launching of three V-2 missiles in October 1945. After the Americans secured their tranche of German rocket scientists in Operation Paperclip, the British Army decided that if these "missile" things were gong to be the future of warfare, they ought to find out the practical issues involved in transporting, fuelling and programming them. And so, whilst there remained German V-2 launch crews available, the Army gathered sufficient men and materials together and in October 1945 launched three V-2s into the North Sea from Krupp's naval gun testing ground near Cuxhaven in northern Germany. The British also acquired the technical drawings for a range of German guided weapons, captured the Walter rocket factory in Kiel (source of the engines for the Me.163 and Me.263 rocket-powered interceptors), and were able to secure interviews with rocket pioneers Otto Pabst, Alexander Lippisch and Eugen Sänger. In particular, a copy plus translation of Sänger's 1944 paper on rocket-powered intercontinental bombers found its way into the Ministry of Aviation library where it was regularly consulted, read and inwardly digested.

All this made Britain one of the world leaders in spacecraft design - but it was kept highly secret, was passed over by the Americans, and ultimately cancelled as being too expensive, though only insofar as successive Governments lacked the political will to spend money on spaceflight rather than other projects. This book is therefore a monument to the unseen teams of backroom scientists and engineers who laboured in secret and whose work was never acknowledged. It is a fitting tribute.… (mais)

Another Advanced Concept killed by Lack of National Will

The depth and scope of coverage of this volume is impressive. Far from just coverage of MUSTARD (Britain's Space Shuttle.) and it's direct antecedents there is coverage of the American and European industry along with a study of hypersonics. (The archival BAC evaluation of the STS is also great reading.)
Readers cognizant of Sandy's White Paper and the rationalization of the British aircraft industry will understand some of the back stories within the volume. Overall there is plenty of great material covering a broad spectrum of design concepts for reusable space vehicles ranging from the concepts of Eugen Sänger to HOTOL.
As for the volume itself, there are plenty of OEM 3 view and brochure drawings along with excellent color illustrations.
Highly Recommended… (mais)

This work is a great achievement in that it resuscitates a world of forgotten prototypes and technology that would be worthy of a Gerry Anderson TV show, the centerpiece of which is an in-depth examination of the "Multi-Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device" (aka Mustard (featured on the book cover)) devised by BAC. This was the concept of a space plane build around the concept of the orbiter and its boosters being the same machine and clustering the air frames to achieve escape velocity for the designated mission vehicle. The goal being to avoid both expensive one-shot rocket boosters and the prevalent period concept of a rocket plane being mated with a hypersonic mothercraft (which BAC designers were skeptical that could be made to work in any reasonable timeframe). There was never enough money for any of these concepts, particularly once the United States government concluded that it really didn't need any design input from Europe for the Space Shuttle and since the European players could never get on the same page; highly recommended.… (mais)