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BBC Radio Norfolk SpecialSpace Station NorfolkNorfolk and the space race

How Brancaster could have become the launch base for the British space programme.

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Brancaster

The flat landscape here was regarded as potentially ideal for a rocket launching site.

  • Brancaster
  • Writer Ed Couzens-Lake grew up in Brancaster
  • If a rocket base had been built here, this entire view could have changed forever
  • Paul Hayes studies the site
  • Plans for Norfolk
  • A suitable site
  • The Black Arrow rockets were tested at High Down on the Isle of Wight
  • The Isle of Wight testing site overlooks the famous Needles
  • A model of a Black Arrow rocket of the type tested by being static-fired on the Isle of Wight
  • A full-size model of the X3 satellite, Prospero, successfully launched by a Black Arrow rocket in 1971
  • A real one!
  • R4 is a real rocket which would have been launched had the project not been cancelled
  • Open wide!
  • In the end the testing range at Woomera in Australia was used as the launch site for Black Arrow, rather than Norfolk
  • On display with the rocket is the real satellite which was the launch spare for Prospero
  • Douglas Millard is the curator of the space gallery at the Science Museum
  • Scale models of a range of space rockets - Black Arrow is the red-tipped model on a shelf, next to the little yellow rocket

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