The one upside of the abrupt cancellation is that the final complete
rocket is hanging in a museum. I went to see it last year. The
lighting is unfortunately terrible, but it's nice to have a complete
artifact that wasn't left outside for fifty years. And it hasn't been
completely painted over in flat gray paint in the way they damaged
everything in the rocket garden at KSC.
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8065340/black-arrow-r4-launch-vehicle-1971-rockets-satellite-launchers-launch-vehicles
The Black Arrow is also notable for being one of the only rocket
programs that was correctly numbered: they started serials at zero.
On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 8:01 AM roxanna Mason
<rocketmaster.ken@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
That's too bad, I liked their rockets, all of them.
K
On Wed, Oct 21, 2020 at 9:44 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2020, roxanna Mason wrote:
I wonder if any of these issues caused them to abandon what was a fairly
successful launch vehicle.
No, Black Arrow was a technical success, after the inevitable debugging.
Its demise was mostly because the decision to build it hadn't been
informed by any real thought about why it was needed and what role it
would play. Britain had hardly any *payloads* for it to carry, and the
idea of trying to compete with Scout for third-party business would then
have been pretty far-fetched (there wasn't much such business, and Scout
had a steady stream of US-government business and didn't have to show a
profit in any case).
Henry