One of the major announcements lost in the noise of Boris' spectacular Commons debut yesterday was the indication that we, the UK, will be launching our own GPS Sat system* - no doubt a cogent move against being locked out of the currently broken down and Chinese-infiltrated Galileo system. It's not yet complete, and their actual satellites are built here. The EU doesn't have the know-how. So I suspect an export ban on satellites if the EU continues to be obdurate, plus the launch of contracts for our own £10bn programme (a much better use of the money than HS2) will soon change things around. Yes, I know everyone thinks it's for road pricing but I don't care.
One of Penny Mordaunt's last acts before her defenestration as defence secretary was to green-light developments in the UK's Space Force. As the paper reports -
An RAF spokesman said: "The UK is already is a world-leader in small satellite technology and we’re excited to be partnering with Virgin Orbit, one of the industry’s leading figures, to boost our space ambitions even further." Ms Mordaunt also said the UK is joining Operation Olympic Defender, a US-led international unit aimed at strengthening deterrence against hostile actors in space and at stopping the spread of debris in orbit. Joint Forces Command, which co-ordinates activity across the armed forces, will also be renamed Strategic Command, the Defence Secretary announced.
Speaking at the Air and Space Power Conference in London, Ms Mordaunt said: "Science fiction is becoming science fact. One day I want to see RAF pilots earning their space wings and flying beyond the stratosphere".I wonder whether British spacecraft will be equipped with a feature unique to British tanks, an inbuilt tea-making facility? One hopes so. But our ambitions are not unique - M. Macron across the channel has similar hopes for France, which he hopes to achieve with German money. As Politico EU reports-
The French government will develop laser weapons to fend off attacks in orbit and deploy mini-surveillance satellites by 2023 to protect space-based infrastructure, Defense Minister Florence Parly said today. "Today, our allies and adversaries are militarizing space," Parly said in a speech that confirmed France will set up a space command in Toulouse from September 1. "As time to build resilience gets shorter and shorter, we must act." As Paris moves to counter threats from China, Russia and India, Parly said new legislation would be prepared to consolidate control of France’s space activities directly under the defense ministry.Ah, it's all becoming so ...... 1859. You will recall French hubris was shattered just a year after they built the first ironclad, when we rendered it utterly redundant with HMS Warrior.
* "We will have .... satellite and earth observation systems that are the envy of the world. We will be the seedbed for the most exciting and dynamic business investments on the planet."
32 comments:
Anything that pi$$es on the French bonfire is fine by me.
"down with the damned French villains! My blood boils at the name of a Frenchman! Down, down with the French! … is my constant prayer."
Admiral Nelson
Much better than spending on H2S?
Much better than donating it to EU as alimony.
Plus more fun.
Rather puts £56 billion and-the-rest for around a hundred miles of rail track into its proper perspective.
Road pricing will start to come in on our motorways before much longer. The infrastructure is in place on SMART motorways.
I think I saw somewhere recently that HS2 costs will need to rise by ANOTHER £30 billion (over and above the £56 billion budget).
Cancel that and no payments to the EU?
We could afford a fucking death star!
Mark +1
If, under Alexander Johnson, UK engineers and scientists can pull off a prestige achievement of world class than that would only be a good thing.
Such things are generally done by international co-operation, voluntary or otherwise, however. The US got enormous help from German rocket scientists, for instance, and more recently from Russian ones. But the UK has some very gifted people, if they choose to stay here.
However, a confident, settled country needs sufficient employment to replace those being lost in manufacturing and other areas, which may be very many.
It's hard to see how such a project would employ thousands of ex-steel and car workers.
I'm gonna hang my washing on the To louse line!
@JPM
You've obviously not heard of reaction engines then? Technology is in the proving phase.
Imagine if we could hand them one TWENTIETH of the money earmarked for the calculatedly criminal waste of resource that is HS2?
BAe has just trialed a light aircraft sized drone controlled by ducted air rather than moving surfaces.
The aerospace industry in this country is absolutely tier one, as are capabilities in many other scientific and engineering fields.
This country has things to sell and world class capabilities to share. Belief in it is not based on nostalgia for the past but knowledge of what it has and what we can do when we put our minds to it.
Yep, with JPM on this.
I remember the sense of pride I felt as a young lad, visiting Jodrell Bank, and hearing that the UK telescope was the only facility that could track the booster rockets of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite.
The other - this amazing group of people who became the team that helped to put together the Huygens probe to land on Saturn’s moon, Titan.
Yes, I know, the ESA were involved somewhere, but for ingenuity, determination, and pure eccentricity - I don’t think better could be found than this group of people:
https://youtu.be/uE5POhMnN78
My enthusiasm is highly conditional. I said IF our gifted choose to stay here.
The present political climate - the denial of the validity painstaking work undertaken by climate scientists, the cynicism towards "experts" - has alienated many in the scientific field. More brutally, however, many will be thrown out of work by the ending of collaborative projects with European Union entities.
These are highly sought-after, mobile, internationally-minded people. It was for their work that the internet was invented.
It is not just in cutting-edge fields where such abilities are required either, they are needed at many levels in industry.
Johnson needs to do more than to come out with a load of Happy Tiggers huff-and-puff in the Commons.
So far, No.10's office has indicated that there were NO concrete proposals in relation to anything that he said yesterday.
This needs to change - fast.
".....the denial of the validity painstaking work undertaken by climate scientists...."
That's it, all doubts are put to rest.
You've won the sc_rollover as far as I'm concerned.
Peoples perception of 'climate scientists' is coloured by their obvious controlled motives based on producing the 'right answers' no matter what the science says. Their funding being 'result dependent' does NOT validate the work they deliver nor is the obvious political manipulation of those results helpful in delivering the right outcome.
As for 'car workers' being re-employed in space industries, the liklihood is that the space services will take decades to evolve and the movement towards EV's and robotic manufacture would create a natural course correction for engineer-based jobs that would slide neatly into a space requirment - they don't all need to be 'rocket scientists' after all.
But ideas that are actually sensible and valid are rarely either suggested and even more rarely propagated by Government. But redirecting funding from white elephants to industries with potential is certainly an interesting prospect for our futures.
Well, Johnson might be able to reassure some in the scientific domain.
In 2013 he announced plans for an Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) in London, but was criticised for delaying the implementation period until after he had left power, and for limiting the affected area to the Congestion Charge Zone.
(In a 2014 interview with New Scientist, during his time as mayor, Johnson said that he thought the London of 2034 would no longer have any vehicles powered by fossil fuels.)
So he is actually capable of formulating policy, and is not fact-immune.
@JPM
Hells teeth Cheerful, "climate scientists" make the EU appear sane!
“Yes”, I caught the very brief mention by PM BJ in his first speech of his intention to set up our own GPS system, for which I fully approve and I hope is executed.
For security reasons we cannot rely on using Galileo if the EU locks us out of the manufacturing of the system.
I think it is well worth listening to a BBC Hardtalk programme interviewing Graham Turnock, the CEO of the UK Space Agency concerning this matter :
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cswj4g
Particularly memorable and instructive to me was the BBC interviewer asking Mr. Turnock as to how he voted in the EU referendum.
@ Mark 0821
Once we stop pi$$ing it against the wall, make that 2 death stars.
https://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_18794_net_contributors_to_eu_budget_n.jpg
RAC, on the one hand perhaps, but there's the small matter, that financial links with the European Union have given the UK about five trillion pounds in business revenues since 2000. You don't have to lose a big share of that before your tax returns fall greatly outweighs the contributions savings.
A trade deal with the US would maybe increase GDP by about 0.2%, whereas the impact of a no deal would perhaps cut it by about seven percent. The experts telling us this are scientists too, aren't they?
4/4
@Cheerful
If you are going to include every single groat of trade etc (which you would have to do to get to 5 trillion).
Well it ain't a one way strasse is it?
The "experts" you mention BTW were telling us about a 30 billion emergency budget within days of simply voting leave. No, they aren't scientists.
Oh, @JPM - although unfair now your innings is over - "painstaking work" is not proof of anything; and 'denying' is based on what is being denied - the usual 'climate denier' is not a scientific argument.
In truth, the UK may well have cut down on emissions - by outsourcing them to other countries; along with the jobs.
It's all BS - for the most part, anyway.
Hohohoooo, where do I go to bid on the fertilizer contract for the yUK magic money tree? I need a good earner for my pension years.
yUK has not figured out how to build air-conditioned train carriages or manage to keep an air terminal running yet, all of a sudden they are space kings. Risible nonsense.
@Cascadian
is that in the same way most Indians can't even find paper to wipe their arses but can launch moon rockets?
Piss on road pricing. It is one of the ways the globo elite scum will try to price ordinary people out of their cars.
We need to be working out the ways to sabotage smart motorways and roads and doing laser work to blind--and hopefully in time destroy-- the scummy state's satellites.
Brexit is good --but it is only round one against the globo-elite. And Brexit or not Johnson cannot be trusted--none of them can.
@ Cascadian 18:17
Trains might be a bit warm in summer but they're also a bit chilly in winter, sort of cancels itself out. That really is a snowflake crying point, I would hope that Brits are made of sterner stuff than that.
Oh BTW are the US still hitching rides into space from the Russians.
Craig Murray doesn't seem too happy, claiming that... "we now have the most right wing British government since 1832."
I do hope he's right on that.
That ex-nightclub doorman from Durham, history graduate Oxford, self-taught to degree level in mathematics, and now boss - yes - at No. 10, Dominic Cummings, is interested in eugenics, I read.
I wonder which section of the people he would like to see eliminated from the national blood line? Not the elite, is it, Mr. Ecks?
@ 07:42
I'd guess his sights will be on the cheese eating surrender monkeys.
If you mean the French, RAC, they did rather better in Mali recently than the hamburger-eating surrender monkeys did in Vietnam or in Afghanistan, didn't they?
No, I'd expect his sights to be set on the now-redundant, benefit-dependent, horny-handed sons of toil from the defunct heavy industrial zones. Wouldn't you?
Pull your socks up Troll and use my correct title in future.
If 'eugenics' can mean Britain for the British (including those that adopt our culture instead of opposing it) then what's wrong with that?
Dave, I sincerely doubt that someone of Cummings intellectual prowess and apparent philosophy would want to do something as cretinously blunt and unproductive as to "purify" the race eugenically.
Rather, I'd expect him to want to remove the education-immune dead wood, in an ever more technologically-advanced, knowledge-and-ability-based economy and society.
(It's possible to do this by economic restructuring, and by the benefits system to quite some measure.)
He must have seen plenty of it during his nights as a night club doorman. We know who they are, and how they vote too, don't we?
I have a high regard for the self-taught in science, mathematics etc., especially those who have an arts background.
Anon esq.
RAC, read the article Raedwald referenced, Richard Branson's vanity project for people with too much loose change is the RAF partner. The guy who cannot run choo-choo trains on time or comfortably is the supposed pathway for a great future in space for yUK. You are being fleeced, AGAIN!
I believe the USA are no longer partnering with the Russians to supply the international space station, free enterprise has won out, SpaceX Dragon now does that job, wasteful NASA.gov having proved they are no longer capable, have been reduced to the role of booking agent.
If you enjoy the current deplorable yUK infrastructure, then I suspect you will be well pleased with Mr BoJo as prime minister.
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