It’s Valentine’s Day morning and Calum woke up with Rupert Lowe promising to restore Britain. Tom made bacon sandwiches and tea with plenty of sugar. And Britain’s vertical launch dreams just died—Orbex, the country’s great hope for homegrown rockets, has collapsed into administration. Is this a tragedy or were they building the wrong rockets all along?
What follows is a sprawling argument about whether Britain should mourn or celebrate, why the government won’t fund proper space ambitions, and the deeper aesthetic war underlying every political debate in this country. From Jim Ratcliffe’s “colonisation” comments triggering the PM to demand an apology, to the question of whether HCBGs or keffiyeh-wearing Oxfam shoppers represent the real Britain, Tom and Calum diagnose why we can’t have nice things—and what it would take to build an O’Neill cylinder with cricket fields anyway.
Tom and Calum discuss:
The Orbex collapse as Britain’s space 9/11: The vertical launch company went into administration after a Franco-German takeover fell through. Tom mourns the loss of Union Jack rockets. Calum says “they were building the wrong rockets”—small satellites when SpaceX’s super heavy lift has made that model obsolete. “We’re doing this weird combination of all space in industry, very little government funding, but we want the totemic sexy capabilities. We’re not providing a market for them.”,
Britain’s actually brilliant space sector: Space Forge with their 1,000°C furnace and Pridwen heat shield named after Arthur’s shield. Surrey Satellite Technology Limited pioneering shoebox-sized satellites. Astroscale doing “space MOTs”—fixing and removing orbital debris. “We do have a pretty cool space sector in terms of the small stuff, the space engineering frontier.”,
The milestone payment model SpaceX used: “You offer fixed amounts of money as milestones. If you hit the milestones you release more.” Tom Kalil’s Renaissance Philanthropy approach. “If you put up money for competitions you only have to pay out if you get the capability.” Far better than cost-plus contracts that create infinite money pumps and overruns,
The regulatory sandbox is actually good: Companies working on new space tech can “send someone to sit in a room with someone from DSIT and come up with regulation in real time.” If you want to test nuclear propulsion in space, “the cold hand of DSIT reaches out even that far. It will gently tickle you instead of totally throttling you.”,
The mythic quality Britain’s missing: Lord Kempsell asked what the plan was to get an Englishman on Mars. No answer. “I think it’s the mark of a healthy country to have that kind of ambition. I think it’s good to foster the ambition of young men who might wish to die defending the British settlement on Olympus Mons.”,
The real aesthetic war in Britain: Not HCBGs vs reformers. It’s “Green Party style—privilege is bad, keffiyeh as your style statement, women with quite short-cropped hair, big boots, Doc Martens with Superman socks. A kind of lower-middle-class earnest, very morally fierce Britain of suburban middle towns.” In Cornwall: coastal towns are “Joules, Jack Wills, Helly Hansen, HCBG Central.” Inland towns: “two vegan restaurants and an occult bookshop.”,
Jim Ratcliffe and elite defection: Said Britain has been “colonised by immigrants.” PM demanded apology, Number 10 welcomed it when he gave soft apology. Tom’s friend on football group chat: “plainly racist.” Tom: “I don’t think it is. Strong meat linguistically, but not plain racism.” Government wasting time on words instead of integration issues,
Why the PM shut it down so fast: Not strictly semantically accurate but “there is something in it—whole areas have changed, people staying, sending remittances home, organized crime. You could say there’s some truth to the word colonisation. The fact there’s some truth to it is why the PM has been so quick to shut it down.”,
The progressive theory of speech codes: “If you punish people hard enough for breaking the speech code, the problem will go away. Because there was no problem anyway. The problem was the working class getting false consciousness because of elites like Ratcliffe.” So you punish Ratcliffe at the source—despite him being a tax exile which doesn’t help his public image,
Plus: Tom’s 10pm tatty scone gammon eggs Benedict, why Calum thought he’d be grooming talent at Civic Future, the milkman arriving at KC3, fake smoke allegations at British rocket companies, and whether frame-mogging Chinese astronauts requires large bums like skeleton bobsledders.
