Britain is having another go at building a space industry

Just around the headland from the Needles, a set of razor-sharp sea cliffs on the Isle of Wight, off England’s southern coast, lies a curious historical dead end. A series of concrete bunkers built into a hillside are all that remain of a cold-war rocket-testing facility. Built in the 1950s, they were designed to help Britain keep pace with America and the Soviet Union in the race to build rockets and ballistic missiles. In the end Britain launched just a single satellite on its domestically produced Black Arrow rocket, in 1971, before scrapping the programme on cost grounds. It remains the only country to have developed and then abandoned a domestic space-launch capability.

Half a century later, space is back on the agenda. In 2020 the British government and Bharti Global, an Indian firm, spent around $500m each on stakes in OneWeb, a satellite operator driven into bankruptcy by covid-19. OneWeb is in the midst of building a constellation of hundreds of low-flying satellites, designed to beam internet access to anywhere on Earth; on July 26th it announced a merger with Eutelsat, a European operator of geostationary satellites whose shareholders include the French government.