Talk:Blue Streak (missile)

Untitled
Blue Streak was not a continuation of Black Knight. Black Knight was an entirely different vehicle intended to investigate the problems of the re-entry body containing a nuclear warhead coming back into the atmosphere.

Also, the use of liquid fuel was irrelevant to the cancellation. The missile was intended to be housed in an underground silo capable of withstanding a one megaton blast one mile away. The cost of these silos plus the political sensitivity of their siting was the principal reason for the cancellation.

Nicholas Hill

CNHill@aol.com

Launch history
User Spidercorp has added a full launch history of Blue Streak which is presumably correct as far as it goes, but it does not include the sattelite launch mentioned in the line above, and so cannot be complete. Man with two legs 22:04, 4 February 2007 (UTC) Man with two legs 18:28, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Proposed merger

 * The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

I have proposed that Blue Streak Satellite Launch Vehicle be merged into this article. This is because it seems to be about a series of proposals which are not notable enought to sustain their own article, and relate closely to this article. -- GW_SimulationsUser Page 16:47, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree that the merger makes sense.  The launch vehicle shares the history of the missile and thus there is a lot of commonality between the the two articles.   Bringing them together into a coherent whole describing the Blue Streak missile and satellite launch vehicle seems the best approach to me. MarkPos 20:39, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, I think that's long enough. No objections noted, so I'm going to go ahead and merge. -- GW_SimulationsUser Page 21:04, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Times & Politics
The times quoted for 'go' to launch are not accurate. The missile could be kept pre-cooled and then fuelled and launched within two minutes or so. Ice formation on the LOX tank, which after all was only 14 thou thick FSM1 stainless at the top end did not seem to be a problem. I think the time of 4.5 minutes given for fuelling is a misprint for 45 minutes. Seadowns (talk) 11:21, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Talking of this project without mentioning the office politics by which it was surrounded paints a very uneven picture. It's a bit like talking about Florence Nightingale without mentioning the Crimean Was. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Drg40 (talk • contribs) 17:37, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, go ahead and improve it then. Can you provide sources? BTW, I've put a title in for this section so it can be distinguished from the merge proposal above -- GW_SimulationsUser Page 21:01, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Ah. My big mouth. I was only a section leader, trial engineer at Spadeadam so what I saw with my own eyes and what I can now prove are two entirely different things. MInd you any piece of equipment that goes from 0 to 30,000 rpm in 30mS (the engine turbines on the RZ2 Mark 3) had, and has, my rapt attention. My job was to operate the Engine Control Panel during static firing so I can still recite more facts and figures about the RZ2 than it is good for an old man to know!

"For much of the period the British Goverment declined to be part of ELDO, so the organisation consisted of the Dutch, Belgian, Italian, French and German governments and Hawker Siddeley Dynamics Ltd. (the successor company to de Havilland Propellers Ltd.). When Kourou was agreed as the equatorial launch site, the French felt it particularly important that the British govenment should be involved. Subsequent to this re-arrangement the British again attempted to withdraw, feeling that this would cause the collapse of ELDO, only to discover that the contract required them to make significant contribution to the costs of the development of Kourou, and the French and others intended to proceed without Blue Streak." (This meeting, where the Brits announced their withdrawal and the French invited them to read the contract was (according to the French) supposed to have been one of the funniest pieces of "one-upmanship" of all time)

Throughout the period while the British government failed to be directly involved with ELDO, they nonetheless attempted to exercise detailed control. For example; a representative of Farnborough attempted to halt the static firing of F4 at Spadeadam in the last few moments because his copy of the break book for F1 had an entry for the removal of the autopilot for the vehicle, but the matching entry for the replacement of the equipment was not properly signed. Such a hold at that time would have cost a great deal of money and, in front of the national press, been something of a PR disaster. Also, by this time, F1 was not only a heap of junk mostly buried in the Australian desert, but it manifestly had had an autopilot fitted, after some delay and frantic phone calls the count-down continued. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Drg40 (talk • contribs) 13:28, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

more information
I remember the cancellation of the Blue Streak and seem to recall that it was based on the American Atlas rocket.

By the late 1950s the liquid fuelled ICBM was being technically overtaken by the solid fuelled rocket. The Blue Streak would take about two hours to fuel and fire and by the late 50s the famous "four minute" warning was becoming known. The slow pace of Blue Steak development was probably based on growing awareness that it was becoming obsolete.

The Blue Streak was being completely outclassed by the more rapidly launched solid fuel rockets. Keeping the rocket on the ground and ready loaded with liquid oxygen lead to serious embrittlement of the casing alloys. This meant that the rocket was more likely to explode on the ground than take off.

These technical problems were later tacitly admitted by the later purchase of the solid fuel Polaris which had a much longer shelf life.AT Kunene (talk) 13:03, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Sorry. There was an technology exchange agreement with the US which meant certainly that there was a lot of input from Atlas. RR were of the opinion that the Atlas engines were not of a fit standard and undertook a complete redesign during which - for example - the engines became manoeverable as the result of a cruciform mounting point. Thus unlike Atlas Blue Streak did not need separate guidance engines because the engine nozzles could be moved plus or minus 7 degrees on tow axes (quite a sight if you were in the prop bay when they were moved I promise]. Additionally the Atlas first stage that Glenn rode included a lox/kerosene intertank diaphram which had been reversed 8 times. If we creased ours once it was removed from service. IOW the engineering was to a higher standard - as one would have expected from a later model. The US took the technical info from Blue Streak and improved that further to give Titan. Saturn's engines were similar although much much bigger. Incidentally I have found my copy of the RZ2 Mk2/3 overview manual - copyright RR. Am I allowed to put pictures from it up here or does anybody know to whom I should apply? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Drg40 (talk • contribs) 21:20, 15 May 2011 (UTC)


 * They were fuelled with LOX / kerosene and they were silver. That's about as far as the similarity goes. Atlas was notable for two distinct features: 1 1/2 staging and the use of balloon tanks. Blue Streak used neither. The Rolls-Royce RZ2 was developed from a Rocketdyne engine, but that's not a huge relationship.


 * It's simplistic to say that "solid rockets overtook liquid rockets". What happened is that H bomb physics packages became smaller, so warheads became lighter. A lighter warhead can use a smaller, i.e. solid fuelled, launcher and no longer needed a Titan II. The other advantages of the solid rocket are obvious. Improved guidance also helped: better CEP permitted a less powerful warhead, smaller and lighter guidance also didn't need such a truck to haul it.

I think I would add the point that when, at last, it was realised that von Braun's demands for bigger and bigger liquid fuelled engines for the first stage missed the point, common sense crept in. Specific impulse is a vital consideration for 2nd and subsequent stages, but when all you have to do is lug the engines to the ignition point by truck, within reason SI becomes less important because you can just add more engines to achieve the desired thrust/weight of the initial launch stage.

I thought the tanks on Blue Streak were "balloons", The Lox tank went from 19 thou at the intertank diphram down to 14 thou at the other end - all fsm1 stainless. When you touched it, it went 'boing', so I thought of it as a balloon!

The fact that the RZ engine could be vectored was a huge difference, and was reflected in a great deal of the design.

Drg40 (talk) 09:24, 1 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Polaris was never a replacement for Blue Streak. Blue Steel and Skybolt were the replacement for Blue Streak (OK, this is somewhat debatable) and Polaris (which came out of nowhere, with no previous RN involvement in strategic nuclear deterrence) was the well-known sop for the cancelled Skybolt. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:24, 3 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Blue Streak was cancelled because the only geologically-suitable areas in which to build the silos were near large-ish population centres on the east coast and to be seen to be prepared go ahead with the building of such sites would have been electoral suicide for any political party going to the polls with a pro-Blue Streak policy.


 * BTW, the missiles would not have been any more 'vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike' than any other US or USSR missile. That was the whole point of housing them in underground silos. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.29.18.153 (talk) 23:09, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Incidentally, and this has quietly irritated for some time, now I have to hand my copy of the formal report of the F1 vehicle at Woomera including launch, the fault towards the end of the F1 flight was not because of fuel sloshing. The fault was that the gain change unit (which changed the amount the engines moved to correct the deviation of the vehicle) only had two gain changes and these were not enough to cope with the control algorithm needed for a vehicle whose all up weight varied so dramatically in flight. and as a result of over correction the fuel began to slosh in the tanks. Indeed, when the WREBUS break up units fired the vehicle was pulling negative g. Although not available at the time of design the computery was available then to provide better gain change and many more steps. So not as big a problem as at first appears. Much of the report is concerned with calculating the lift off thrust of the engines and the vibration environment in flight, but particularly at cut off. 10:47, 21 August 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.154.214.86 (talk)

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This is not unique
The engines were unique at that time in that they could be vectored by seven degrees

Nearly all guidance systems of this era worked this way, and it remains true to this day. Notes above suggest this is compared to the Atlas, which used verniers. Thor (flown 1955) and Jupiter (1957) are largely identical in performance and even use the same engine, both use TVC for control and it was on this engine that it was developed. Almost every BM since then has. I am removing this statement. Maury Markowitz (talk) 11:19, 28 October 2019 (UTC) Would you care to cite a source for that assertion? The entries for the two systems to which you refer will also need correction.Drg40 (talk) 20:24, 21 May 2020 (UTC)