In news that has shaken the celestial confidence of a certain billionaire with a penchant for cowboy hats and space-faring selfies, Blue Origin’s latest rocket has performed a rather spectacular impersonation of a Guy Fawkes firework. The New Shepard vehicle, or what was left of it, decided to explore alternative flight trajectories involving a rapid unscheduled disassembly approximately one minute into its latest uncrewed jaunt. Cue furious scribbling in the margins of NASA's beleaguered Moon timetable, already looking more dog-eared than a second-hand copy of the Highway Code.
Sources close to the matter, which is to say a sweaty-palmed PR drone speaking via a secure line from a broom cupboard in Kent, have confirmed that the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded the fleet with all the ceremony of a headteacher confiscating a bag of sherbet lemons. The investigation shall be thorough, the findings finger-wagging, and the schedule slippage as inevitable as a hangover after a Fleet Street Christmas party. For NASA, which had placed a rather heavy bet on Blue Origin's lunar lander to ferry astronauts to the Moon's surface, this presents a quandary roughly the size of a small moon. The Artemis programme, already slipping faster than a greased pig at a county fair, now faces yet another hurdle. One can almost hear the collective sigh from Houston, a sound akin to air escaping from a very expensive balloon.
Yet fly in the ointment for this transatlantic space race kerfuffle, or rather a bee in the bonnet, is the serene, unmoved face of Her Majesty's Space Agency. While NASA performs its ritual hair-tearing, the UK Space Agency has issued a statement so wonderfully, quintessentially British in its stiff-upper-lipitude that it could have been written on a napkin at a club in Pall Mall. They have, with the barest hint of a raised eyebrow, affirmed that their own independent launch schedule remains utterly, splendidly intact. Their path to orbit, they imply, is paved not with the exploded dreams of Texas-based hobbyists, but with the solid, sensible concrete of British engineering and a cup of tea. One can picture the Space Minister, a chap who probably names his cats after Lagrange points, adjusting his spectacles and muttering, 'Well, quite. Unfortunate for the Americans, but we do have our own itinerary, you know.'
This magnificent piece of placid defiance is, of course, wildly optimistic and based on a schedule that exists largely in the mind of a civil servant with a spreadsheet fetish. The UK's launch ambitions, currently centred around the Shetland Space Centre and a few other hopeful patches of windswept moorland, have a tendency to slip sideways like a drunk on an icy pavement. But in the high-stakes game of cosmic one-upmanship, and in a world starved for good news, the British establishment will grasp any opportunity to tut sagely at a foreign power's misfortune while polishing its own teacup.
So raise a glass of warm, flat gin, you magnificent space-faring islanders. Blue Origin may have turned another rocket into a firework display, but the British Space Agency has a schedule, and by God, they will adhere to it. At least, until the next funding round. The Moon, it seems, will have to wait for the return of the pinstripe suit.
