HOB’S LANE 015

There is something peculiarly British about having the chance to go to space and not being able to afford it.

The British Experimental Rocket Group, as troubled and beset as it is in these stories, still somehow has a whiff of empire lost. Previous to NASA, the biggest and most expensive exploratory agency in the world was the office of John Barrow, second secretary of the British Admiralty, who over thirty years sent ships all across the planet to fill in the gaps in their atlases.

Also: of modernism, of new worlds. Britain was still launching Black Knight rockets. Nobody knew that future was already lost.