The skies above Boca Chica, Texas, were, as of approximately four hours ago, violated by a contraption of colossal hubris and aerospace-grade aluminium. This was the Starship V3, the latest iteration of Elon Musk’s towering testament to the principle that if you throw enough money, methamphetamine, and misplaced ambition at a problem, it will eventually lift off, albeit with a slight chance of spectacularly immolating the surrounding landscape. The craft, which looks like a grain silo built by a child who has read too much Heinlein, successfully ascended, prompting a chorus of flatulent applause from the tech-bro clergy who worship at the altar of ‘disruption’.
But hold onto your monocles, gentle reader, for there is a subplot more absurd than Musk’s public persona. Her Majesty’s government, in a fit of delusion that would be medically classified if it weren’t for the fact that the entire cabinet appears to be running on a cocktail of gin and desperation, has declared this event a stepping stone for Britain’s own celestial ambitions. Yes, Britain. The country that can barely run a train service without a national tragedy, the nation whose space programme currently consists of a few retired scientists in Slough pointing a weather balloon at the sky, now believes it can be a ‘commercial space leader’.
Let us parse this absurdity. The UK Space Agency, a body whose primary achievement is producing a very nice leaflet about the importance of STEM education, has apparently decided that the path to galactic empire lies in piggybacking on Musk’s billionaire whims. The plan, as far as anyone can tell, is to invite private companies to launch from British soil, presumably from a field in Cornwall that smells faintly of pasties and regret. The hope is that this will generate ‘economic growth’, a term that politicians use to mean ‘we have no idea what we’re doing but please vote for us’.
Meanwhile, back in Texas, the Starship V3 achieved orbit, or at least didn’t explode in the first three minutes, which by Musk’s standards is a rousing success. The craft is designed to carry cargo and, eventually, humans to Mars, a planet that is currently quite happy without us, thank you very much. The market for interplanetary cargo is, shall we say, niche, but Musk has never let reality interfere with a good press release. The launch was streamed live, allowing the world to witness the glorious spectacle of a rocket that looks like a middle finger pointed at the International Space Station, which is in fact the sort of polite diplomacy Musk excels at.
But for Britain, the real question is not whether we can build a rocket, but whether we can build one that doesn’t cost the equivalent of the NHS budget for a decade. The government’s strategy, as far as one can decipher from the obfuscatory language of the ‘Spaceflight Act 2021’, is to ‘leverage the private sector’. In other words, we will give tax breaks to billionaires and hope they do something useful, like launch a satellite that can track the number of pensioners slipping on icy pavements. This is the same logic that gave us privatised railways, water companies that pump sewage into our rivers, and a broadband network that still relies on carrier pigeons.
The sheer, breathtaking irony is that Britain’s most notable contribution to space exploration in recent years was Tim Peake, a man who orbited the Earth for six months and did some experiments with lettuce. We celebrated this as a triumph of British ingenuity. Meanwhile, Musk is building a machine that could theoretically fly to Mars, where it will presumably plant a flag and start selling advertising space. The difference in ambition is the difference between a boozy fart at a dinner party and a full-scale orchestral symphony.
And so, as the Starship V3 soared into the void, leaving a trail of spent fuel and broken dreams, one could almost hear the faint, plaintive cry of a nation that once ruled the waves, now reduced to begging for scraps from the feast of a South African-born Canadian-American who thinks the word ‘pedestrian’ refers to a type of software. Will Britain become a commercial space leader? Only if our definition of ‘leadership’ includes being the first to put a Greggs on the moon. But honestly, the queue for a pasty on the lunar surface would probably be shorter than the one at Heathrow.
