A day for feeling a bit ashamed of my own nation.  No, not just England's dismal performance in the cricket...

Tonight I've been re-watching the TV series about Britain's attempts, mostly successful, to develop nuclear weapons, and the various means of delivering them - in each case, usually then being discontinued, in favour of using an American version instead.  Whatever one's views on nuclear weaponry, the shortsightedness exhibited by successive governments in developing, and then cancelling, all these various systems, was staggering and saddening.

I was particularly struck by the last episode, about the Blue Streak missile programme, which spawned a fully functioning satellite-launching system, Black Arrow.  This, somewhat in spite of the government, rather than because of it, in 1971 placed into orbit the UK's only self-launched satellite, Prospero, which is still orbiting today, and, so accurately was it inserted into orbit, that it's expected to be there for a long while yet.

Sadly, the project had already been cancelled, and Black Arrow never flew again.

Wikipedia's page on Black Arrow bears a rather telling statement:

"As of 2009, the United Kingdom is the only country to have successfully developed and then abandoned a satellite launch capability."

What a sad thing.  What a bunch of visionless idiots we've had at the helm of this country, and for so many decades. The colour of the rosette changes every now and then, but the ability to totally fail to have a clue lives on.