Not Just NASA

BLACK ARROW

Black Arrow, officially capitalised BLACK ARROW, was a British satellite expendable launch system.

Black Arrow originated from studies by the Royal Aircraft Establishment for carrier rockets based on the earlier Black Knight rocket; the project was authorised by the British government in late 1964. Development of Black Arrow was largely performed by the prime contractor, the British aerospace company Saunders-Roe, and later undertaken by Westland Aircraft as the result of a merger. Both the first and second stage engines were produced by Bristol Siddeley at their factory in Ansty, Warwickshire. Assembly of the first and second stages was carried out at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight. Once manufactured, each Black Arrow vehicle was transported by ship to Australia prior to being launched from the RAAF Woomera Range Complex.

Black Arrow was a three-stage rocket, fuelled by RP-1 paraffin (kerosene) and high test peroxide, a concentrated form of hydrogen peroxide (85% hydrogen peroxide + 15% water).While the first two stages featured thrust vectoring to provide attitude control, the third stage did not have an attitude control system, and instead relied upon spin-stabilisation along with a reaction control system. The first stage was intentionally designed to be compatible with Blue Streak, as well as to be interchangeable with Coralie. Furthermore, several derivatives of Black Arrow were proposed to provide for increased payload capacity.

A total of four launches of Black Arrow were performed between 1969 and 1971, the first two being demonstration flights to prove the launcher's capabilities. While the first and third flights were failures, the second and fourth flights were successful. Black Arrow's final flight placed the Prospero satellite into low Earth orbit, making it the first and only successful orbital launch to be conducted by the United Kingdom. British officials decided to discontinue the programme in favour of using American Scout rockets instead, the Ministry of Defence having calculated this option to be cheaper than continuing with Black Arrow. The final Black Arrow to be completed, which never flew, has been preserved intact at the Science Museum, London, along with the flight spare for the Prospero satellite.

BEAGLE 2

The Beagle 2 is an inoperative British Mars lander that was transported by the European Space Agency's 2003 Mars Express mission. It was intended to conduct an astrobiology mission that would have looked for evidence of past life on Mars.

The spacecraft was successfully deployed from the Mars Express on 19 December 2003 and was scheduled to land on the surface of Mars on 25 December. ESA, however, received no communication from the lander at its expected landing time on Mars, and declared the mission lost in February 2004 after numerous attempts to contact the spacecraft were made.

The Beagle 2's fate remained a mystery until January 2015, when it was located on the surface of Mars in a series of images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE camera. The images showed it landed safely but two of its four solar panels failed to deploy, blocking the spacecraft's communications antenna.

The Beagle 2 is named after HMS Beagle, the ship that took the naturalist Charles Darwin on his round-the-world voyage.

Skylark was designed to gather data on the upper atmosphere, to help develop the Blue Streak ballistic missile. But it could also be used by university researchers to learn more about the Earth, Sun and deep space. In 1957-8 the rocket was Britain’s main contribution to the International Geophysical Year, a global project to research the physics of the Earth. 

SKYLON

Skylon is a series of concept designs for a reusable single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane by the British company Reaction Engines Limited (Reaction), using SABRE, a combined-cycle, air-breathing rocket propulsion system.

The vehicle design is for a hydrogen-fuelled aircraft that would take off from a specially built reinforced runway, and accelerate to Mach 5.4 at 26 kilometres (85,000 ft) altitude (compared to typical airliner's 9–13 kilometres or 30,000–40,000 feet) using the atmosphere's oxygen before switching the engines to use the internal liquid oxygen (LOX) supply to accelerate to the Mach 25 necessary to reach a 400 km orbit.

GNOMES in SPACE

Rocket Lab will be using Electron’s Kick Stage to deliver the 150mm titanium garden gnome into orbit. The gnome itself has been manufactured by Wellington’s Weta Workshop, the studio behind many of the makeup effects, weapons, and creatures featured in The Lord of the Rings films. The rocket has the ability to reorient itself and leave orbit to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, leaving Half-Life 2’s Gnome Ernie Chompski to sail through space on his own.

This is, after all, the joke: to earn the achievement ‘Little Rocket Man’ in Half-Life 2, players had to carry the Garden Gnome object – known to the community as Gnome Chompski – from the communications building all the way to the end of the game and place it inside a rocket capsule. Newell apparently plans to do exactly this.