The news arrives with the predictable blend of disappointment and weary resignation: Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket suffers an anomaly, and NASA’s already beleaguered Moon mission is pushed further into the calendar. For the British spaceport aspirants in Cornwall and Sutherland, this is another cold draught of reality. One cannot help but wonder if we are not witnessing mere engineering hiccups but a broader intellectual decadence, a failure of the modern age to marshal the will and resources that once sent men to the Moon on a shoestring budget.
The fall of Rome was not marked by a single barbarian incursion but by a thousand small erosions of competence. Here, we see the same pattern: a privatised space race that promises much but delivers delays, a reliance on billionaires whose whims are as changeable as the wind, and a national space programme that seems to have lost its nerve. The Victorian engineers who built the Great Western Railway would have been appalled by such a shambolic pace.
They understood that grand projects require not just capital but a sense of national purpose. Our current predicament, with its endless reviews and technological stumbles, suggests a society that has forgotten how to dream on a grand scale. Perhaps that is the real tragedy.
The UK spaceport, once a symbol of Brexit-era ambition, now hangs like a forgotten Christmas decoration. We should not be surprised. This is the cost of a culture that celebrates disruption over discipline, hype over substance.
Without a return to the virtues that built empires, we will continue to watch our lunar aspirations slip away, one mishap at a time.
