Opinion

Britain isn’t competent enough to go to the moon

Tim Stanley
Mon, August 28, 2023 

Indian crowds celebrate their country's moon landing - IDREES MOHAMMED/Shutterstock

Guess how much it cost for India to send a rocket to the moon? Roughly £58 million. That’s million, not billion. How very Indian both to pull off an historic first and do it cheaper than everyone else. But in case you rudely assume Bengaluru Mission Control is run as a sweat shop, with physicists being paid 40 pence a day, it turns out Russia spent only £159 million for its rival space launch.

Counterintuitively, as technology becomes more sophisticated, it also becomes cheaper. The United States spent about £280 billion putting a man on the moon – yet my mobile phone boasts one million times more memory than the guidance computer on Apollo 11, and I bought that for just £400. (Said phone was stolen in Greece. One marvels to think of the complex drug deals it is processing as I write.)

The old space race was about marshalling vast resources for superpower competition. Now it is privatised; commercialised; ruined by too many tourists; and within the budget of nations to which the UK still sends foreign aid. So: if the moon, like Everest, is more accessible than ever before, why isn’t the UK going there?

We used to be made of bigger stuff. In 1960, members of the British Interplanetary Society – one can imagine monocles and pith helmets – discussed a paper that imagined us landing on the moon as early as 1968, a plan that involved multi-stage rockets, probes and vehicles similar to those later used by the Americans. And why not? It was Britain that helped pioneer jets and missiles, and the paper compared exploration of the surface to crossing Antarctica by foot, which we were the first to do in 1958. Britain had the technical know-how to be a space adventurer.

Alas, we decided to waste our money on hospitals instead. Rather than a world leader, we became a partner to others, cannily saving a fortune in largely pointless trips to the Sea of Tranquility and investing instead in lucrative satellite technology and a large R&D sector. But what we gained in cash, we lost in prestige. Here we are, entering a new age of nation state competition, the price of taking part is falling – and we appear to be sitting out the race. Why? For the cost of the new town hall in Tower Hamlets, £125 million, we could send two rockets to the moon. For the price of HS2, we could probably colonise Mars.

Then again … Say “Britain on the moon” and the mind returns to the hockey-sticks 1950s: one thinks of Hillary crossing the lunar surface with nothing but an oxygen mask and a flask of whisky. Alas, if we tried it today, the price would escalate into the trillions due to red tape and cowboy builders, and the launch would be delayed by neighbours crowdfunding a legal case against the noise.

Finally: the big day, 2050. His Majesty cracks a bottle of Sussex champagne against the fuselage and HMS Diversity blasts off on its voyage to become the first mission to plant a rainbow flag on the moon. Until – what’s this? She’s coming back! The Diversity lands at Gatwick short stay car park and the PM pops inside to have a word with the pilot. He returns looking sheepish, and addresses the nation: “It would seem, unbeknownst to us, that astronauts are automatically enrolled in the RMT. The union has called a stoppage after several television viewers noticed that this rocket is operating without a guard.”

Maybe Britain should stay at home and focus on women’s football.

The art of resigning, Nadine Dorries style

We live in a golden age of resignation letters. There was a time when disgraced ministers wrote “It’s been an honour to serve” and “Best of luck”. Nowadays, they don’t write letters, they write an angry column – in fact Nadine Dorries’s was posted behind a newspaper’s paywall. Constituents initially had to pay money to find out why she was quitting as an MP.

Well worth the money, it is a literary triumph for its passive aggression, particularly this line aimed at Sunak: “I am grateful for your personal phone call on the morning you appointed your cabinet in October, even if I declined to take the call.” Someday, that will be a GCSE set text for those studying sarcasm.

As for the rest, it includes the textbook list of career highs, the sad waste of one’s potential and disappointment that the PM has betrayed conservatism, though the meaning of that word is in the eye of the resigner. Dorries attacks Sunak for raising taxes, which is a fair cop, but also for watering down the green agenda and the Online Safety Bill, which some would argue were never very conservative.

But she will be missed. Warm and funny, she was an imaginative culture secretary, and I sympathise with her irritation at the claim that she was doing nothing as an MP because she didn’t speak in the House recently (I had constituency work, she says). Many MPs rarely speak. We’d be better off with fewer of them and less legislation, with a part-time politics. Our government is bigger than ever, our taxes higher and debate unceasing, yet I don’t think the country is any better for it.

MPs were once satisfied to scrutinise legislation or be part of a team. Now they are all celebs in a jungle, and the way they leave reflects their attitude towards the job. If Profumo were exposed today, he wouldn’t quietly retire from public life, oh no. He’d appear on Loose Women to explain that he is not a philanderer but a sex addict – and to resign would damage his mental health.