A Royal Space Force

What if it had all been different?

Ministry of Space by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Chris Weston, coloured by Laura Martin

A simple premise, here. In this world, the world of the book, Britain is the first — the indispensable — space-going nation. A Britain that did not experience the long, agonised decline of the past eighty years — a country that remains, half a century on from the arrival of its pre-eminence, just about ahead. Ahead by a nose. The only power able to touch the planets around us, to direct the physics of the solar system for the good and the work of people living on the earth.

A lot of timelines have to shuffle, here. We have the original story of how this retro science fiction future was built over fifty years — and we have the assumed present, in 2001, when a half-century of success and abundance arrives at some kind of reckoning.

Illustrated enthrallingly by Chris Weston, coloured by Laura Martin.

But enough, for the moment, about that.

Here’s the pitch.

What if, instead of the scientists behind the V-1 and V-2 programmes being vacuumed up by the Americans in Operation Paperclip or those unlucky few in the east finding their unhappy way into Soviet captivity and service, they were instead induced or inveigled into British service? If Wernher von Braun, instead of sending Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins to the Moon and many others after them, and becoming the subject of a song by Tom Lehrer, instead supervised British rocketry?

Would Britain soon after have launched a V-3 — the first ever ICBM? Would Britain have invented the first sort of space-plane, a souped-up Bell X-1 as flown by Chuck Yeager past Mach one in the late 40s?

Would Britain in such a world be testing rockets of the kind that powered America’s real-life Apollo programme — and would Britain do this in the 50s, launch a three-stage rocket to celebrate the coronation, head to the moon the same decade, head to Mars not many years after that? A permanent space station not long after — beginning the colonisation of the rest of our solar system — abundant solar energy arriving from arrays built on other worlds — a whole new planet earth. Wealth and security and a country on which history’s unforgiving shadow did not fall.

And how might society have changed in the interim? Flying cars, of a kind, propeller packs being the equivalent of jets packs, worn by children — the aesthetics remaining mid-century modern well into the twenty-first century? Everything retrofuturistic — the styling ever akin to the de Havilland Comet (the world’s first jet airliner), or the great white elephants of the immense Bristol Brabazon and the great last hurrah of the flying boats, the Saunders-Roe Princess. These designs seem impossibly ancient now, but to adherents and fans, they’re North Sea art deco — the ideal of a future never pursued, a dream never captured, a promise never kept.

Some things in this book are a little more twentieth century modern, a little like some of the scientific works of the architect Sir Nicholas Grimshaw. Great buildings, domes of glass — a certain bulbousness given even to brushed metal: all this architecture a branching descent from the work of Brunel and the other monumental Victorian engineers.

But enough of the look of the thing for a moment at least. I won’t divulge too much of the plot here, but it’s fair enough to say that this book is the story of obsession: individual obsession with seeing space, experiencing its wonders, grasping as if in one’s hand something of its majesty. The things this would do to a government which made spacefaring its priority. Who would it take to force this kind of thing on a nation’s unwilling, unambitious rulers.

The bending of government and armed forces and politics into permitting work of this kind: the gathering of resources, the creation of new systems, new architectures, new cybernetic structures. How to recover from the distrust of the public — how to marshal resources both primary and human — how to make success the watchword, the thing on which you are judged — how to insist that more men than you alone take extraordinary risks for the sake of the future.

Although there is some effort made in this book to impart a social commentary to all of this — the sense that the sins of the past will out, and all — it is not deadening. This is still a story like all great space agency stories — a story of people in rooms, talking about how to make improbable things happen.

The social context is important enough, in its way. But it is not all-important, as Warren Ellis notes. For history to have continued along its course, someone had to get into space, someone had to make our species a space-faring one. The hitch being that no one did in the time we all have lived. No one has, even now. All this book asks, in its own way, is what if someone had done it? Done it — not to win a brief confrontation of the kind the broader Cold War both created and distracted nations from, but to win it for good, for ever.

Got humanity truly aloft, truly airborne, for the first time.

It didn’t matter that, in this story, it was the union flag on the Moon, on Mars, Ellis writes in his afterword. It only mattered that someone did it. It may be a very long time before humanity makes any true effort in the same direction — a long, unbearable wait until anyone on earth tries to do anything so vital and so immense.