On 28 October 1971, at nine minutes past four in the morning GMT, the Prospero satellite was launched from Woomera in South Australia aboard a Black Arrow rocket, making Britain the sixth country to put a satellite into orbit using a rocket it had built itself. The satellite, developed by the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, carried out experiments on solar cells and micrometeoroid detection and kept transmitting until 1973, after which engineers quietly rang it up once a year to check it was still there.
The achievement came with a sting attached. The Ministry of Defence had already cancelled the Black Arrow programme before the launch, meaning Prospero went up knowing it was the last of its kind. It remains in orbit now, not expected to fall back to earth until around 2070, which makes it rather better at outliving cancelled British programmes than most of us manage.
It is understood the news reached Swindon, then still very much a railway town, with a shrug of professional recognition. Here was a workshop somewhere building something brilliant in a shed, only for someone in Whitehall to decide the shed itself wasn't needed any more. The Great Western Railway works had spent a century proving the principle. Prospero simply confirmed it applied to rockets too.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she remembered the launch being mentioned on the news when she was a teenager, sandwiched between the football results and a programme about canal boats. 'Ron's father worked at the railway works and said it didn't surprise him one bit,' she said. 'Build something that actually works, get told there's no more money for it. They could have put that satellite on a plinth outside the Designer Outlet and called it heritage.'
Gary Tench, Area Manager at Tench Paper Solutions in Westlea, said the anniversary had given him a new way of describing his firm's own 2019 innovation drive, which produced a working prototype paperless invoice system before head office redirected the budget to a car park resurfacing scheme. 'We were basically Black Arrow,' he said. 'Julie still has the prototype in a drawer. It's not technically decommissioned, it's just never been switched back on.'
Prospero, meanwhile, continues its orbit undisturbed, visible through binoculars at perigee if you know where to look and are the sort of person who owns binoculars. It is understood to still be up there doing absolutely nothing useful, which some in Swindon would consider a fitting tribute to the programme that built it.