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Brancaster
today - not a spacecraft in sight
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Dr Bob Parkinson
of the Stevenage company Astrium and father of HOTOL (the mothballed
British Space Shuttle) explained: "Reconnaissance
in those days meant cameras and photographic film, not electronics
and so forth.
"About
that time there was some thinking that in order to do that what
you needed was a vehicle that flew into space and came back again,
bringing the film back. So it wasn't as much a satellite as a spaceplane."
The dream
lives on in Ariane
The Ariane
launcher awaits
lift-off |
Advances in
technology and political changes meant the spaceplane dream and
the Brancaster spaceport were never to reach fruition.
Today you can
still visit the site, where golfers and rare birds take the place
of the rockets and towers. Meantime the descendent of the British
rocket programme, the European Ariane launcher, thunders into the
skies from the slightly warmer climate of Kouro in South America.
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