Last night, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket disintegrated into a billowing fireball over the Texas desert. Another commercial launch failure. Yet the British establishment, ever eager to cosy up to American space adventurers, continues to stake its sovereign launch ambitions on such precarious private partners.
Is this not the same intellectual laziness that has infected our national strategy since the fall of the Empire? We prattle on about ‘global Britain’ while hitching our wagon to a cowboy in a cowboy hat. The Victorians would have built their own rockets.
They understood that true greatness requires steel, not spectacle. We, however, prefer to outsource our destiny to billionaires with poor safety records. Until we learn to launch from the Shetlands with our own engines, we will remain a client state in the final frontier.
And that fireball is a poignant metaphor for the dawning of our post-imperial irrelevance.
