Travel – UK – Leicester – National Space Centre

This is an excerpt from my book Travels through History : Leicester, Lichfield, Lincoln, and Loughborough currently available at a discount.

The National Space Centre is a museum and educational resource covering the fields of space science and astronomy, along with a space research programme in partnership with the University of Leicester. Many of the exhibits, including upright rockets, are in a tower with minimal steel supports and a semi-transparent cladding of ETFE ‘pillows’. ETFE is short for Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene, a fluorine-based plastic, designed to have high corrosion resistance and strength over a wide temperature range. The 42-metre high centre is a very distinctive sight on the Leicester skyline. The museum houses large and small objects. One of the larger ones is the Blue Streak rocket #F16 the last Blue Streak ever made, rescued from the Hawker Siddeley production line by the Liverpool Museum in 1971. It is an example of a British-built liquid-fuelled rocket and the first idea of its creators was to use the rocket as a ballistic missile. In 1954, as Cold War tensions grew, the USA approached the UK Government with a proposal for a joint ballistic missile programme. The USA would develop an Intercontinental missile, and the UK would develop a missile with a range of 2,500–3,000 miles. Britain accepted the proposal and called their missile Blue Streak.

The Blue Streak on display is on loan from the national museums of Liverpool. It was never completed, so the engines and other accessories are miscellaneous spares, and were never to be part of this rocket. The main body of the rocket comprises fuel tanks made of stainless steel less than 1mm thick, as Blue Streak used liquid oxygen and kerosene for fuel. For oxygen to become liquid, it has to be at a temperature of at least –183°C, at which point steel becomes very brittle. To prevent the steel cracking, the Blue Streak engineers made the walls as thin as possible, so today it is necessary to pressurise the fuel tanks to prevent the steel from buckling under atmospheric pressure whilst on display.

They designed Blue Streaks to launch from underground silos, however this was impractical, as the small land area in the UK would mean launch silos near towns and villages, making their inhabitants vulnerable to nuclear attack. In 1960, the Minister of Defence cancelled Blue Streak, saying that it was no longer good value for money. 

However, France was interested in developing a European satellite launcher. In 1961, the UK Government met with other European leaders and the European Launch Development Organisation (ELDO) was born. Blue Streak was to be the first stage of a new European satellite launcher called Europa. The French would build the second stage, called ‘Coralie’, whilst the Germans worked on the third stage, known as ‘Astris’. The remaining partner countries developed the satellite technology the rocket would launch. 

In 1961, Blue Streak was test-fired for the first time. Three years later, they launched the first Blue Streak from Woomera in Australia. Over the years, eleven Blue Streaks launched, and each was a success. However, the Europa system was not a success and never placed a satellite into orbit. There were problems with the separation between the stages. The UK Government lost enthusiasm for the project, which had become very expensive. The failures of the upper stages of Europa gave the UK an excuse to pull out of ELDO. However, the engineers who worked on Blue Streak felt that Europa was a learning curve and that they were on the verge of getting everything right when the cancellation came. The French designed a new first stage to fill the gap left by Blue Streak, as work carried on without the UK. This European launch system soon evolved into the Ariane series of rockets, one of the most successful satellite launchers there has ever been.

One of the smaller objects is the Barwell meteorite sample, part of the UK’s largest recorded meteorite fall. They fell to Earth in the village of Barwell on Christmas Eve 1965 – less than 15 miles from the National Space Centre. People discovered around 44 kilograms of various meteorites, as space stone hunters descended on the Leicestershire village. 

The Barwell meteorites were Stony meteorites of the ordinary chondrite group. They contained chondrules – small round mineral grains, believed to be the building blocks of the rocky inner planets. They formed as molten droplets in space, before joining with other materials to form larger objects like asteroids. Chondrules are some of the oldest solid material in the Solar System, and when they are present in a meteorite like this one, we know that they have not melted since they were first formed. This means they have not changed for 4.55 billion years – making them older than the Earth, which is around 4.54 billion years old. 

The Barwell meteorite fall caused minor damage around the village, with one meteorite crashing into a car. Unsure of what had happened, the car’s owner threw the meteorite into a neighbouring field. Once he realised what he had done, he tried to find the piece again, but never did, which was a pity because it would have paid for a new car. When contacted, the insurance company considered the meteorite an ‘act of God’ and told the car’s owner they wouldn’t pay out. The owner took up his claim with the local church, who also refused to pay out.