There was a time when the launch of a rocket, even a failed one, was a moment of collective breath-holding. Now it is merely a prelude to a far more tedious spectacle: the wrangling of budgets, the shuffling of contracts, and the inevitable parliamentary inquiries into our so-called ‘British Space Command’. The failure of Blue Origin’s latest effort is not, by itself, remarkable. Rockets explode. It is what they do. What is remarkable is the desperation with which we cling to a narrative of technological supremacy while our own space programme wobbles along on a diet of press releases and corporate handouts.
Let us dispense with the polite fictions. The NASA Moon timeline, that great bureaucratic horoscope, was never a schedule. It was a wish. And a wish, as the Romans discovered when their aqueducts began to crack, is not a substitute for engineering. Blue Origin’s mishap merely confirms what anyone with a passing knowledge of the space industry already knows: the private sector is good at selling dreams and terrible at delivering them on time. The New Shepard may have had its debutante ball, but it now appears to be the sort of debutante who falls down the stairs.
And what of British Space Command, that curious institution born from the marriage of military ambition and colonial nostalgia? We are told they are reviewing their partnership with Blue Origin. But what partnership? A few memoranda, a vague promise of future payloads, and the faint hope that some of the glory might rub off on a rainy island that still thinks of itself as an empire. It is rather like a Victorian gentleman reviewing his investment in a Transatlantic steamship firm after the vessel sinks. The appropriate response is not to review the partnership but to question the sanity of the investment.
Some will argue that failure is essential to progress. They will invoke the Apollo 1 fire, the Challenger disaster, the Columbia. But those were sacrifices in a national endeavour, a contest of ideologies, a moment when the West was gripped by a fever of purpose. Today, we have no such fever. We have quarterly earnings reports. We have shareholders. We have the grim spectacle of billionaires treating space as their personal sandbox while the rest of us pay for their mistakes through tax breaks and inflated launch costs.
The British contribution to this farce is particularly galling. We prattle on about sovereignty, about ‘Global Britain’, about our place in the cosmos. Yet we cannot even get a small satellite into orbit without begging Elon Musk for a ride. The Space Command, for all its splendid badges and acronyms, is a Potemkin village. It exists to reassure the public that we are still relevant, that we are still an actor on the world stage, that the Empire has merely relocated to the stars. But the stars, like the Empire, are indifferent to our self-regard.
So let Blue Origin fail. Let their rocket scatter its components across the Texas desert. Let the Moon timeline slip another year, another decade. None of it matters until we ask ourselves the uncomfortable question: what are we doing in space at all? If the answer is merely to keep pace with China or to stroke the ego of British industry, then we are doomed to repeat the cycle of disappointment. The Romans did not conquer the world because of their rockets. They conquered it because of their roads, their laws, their sense of a common purpose. We have none of that. We have Blue Origin. And we have British Space Command, busily reviewing a partnership that should never have existed.
In the end, the rocket’s failure is a metaphor. We are all aboard that flame, falling back to Earth, hoping that someone will pick up the pieces. But no one will. The pieces belong to us, and we must decide whether to rebuild or to admit that the heavens were never ours to conquer.
