Features / Things you didn't know
10 things you didn’t know about Bristol’s space connections
1. In 2000, the European Space Agency held a competition to name their new Cluster Quartet – four spacecraft that would orbit the Earth for 18 years. From over 5,000 entrants across 15 countries, Raymond Cotton from Bristol was crowned the winner and named the spacecraft Salsa, Samba, Tango and Rumba. This name reflects the way the craft stay in formation and manoeuvre around each other while in orbit, like a dance.
Photograph by Neil Phillips
2. Colin Pillinger, born in Kingswood in 1943, was a planetary scientist who was a founding member of the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute. He was the principle investigator for the Beagle 2 Mars lander project, a space mission looking for life on Mars that crash-landed on the red planet on Christmas Day in 2003.
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3. Students and researchers can speak with astronauts in NASA’s International Space Station, download data from satellites in orbit and build and test new satellites while working on their own space missions from a satellite lab and ground station at the University of Bristol. It opened in the Queen’s Building on Woodland Road in November 2017.
4. University of Bristol student Tim Gregory, who is studying for a PhD in Cosmochemistry, made the final of BBC Two’s Astronauts: Do you have what it takes?. The show saw 12 wannabe astronauts compete in some of the physical and mental tasks expected of space explorers, judged by experts including Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.
5. Physicist Michael Johnson, founder of Pocket SpaceCraft, works from the Pervasive Media Studio at the Watershed to expand space exploration to ordinary citizens. The spacecraft Michael has designed weighs less than a quarter of a gram and more than 100 have been launched by NASA, with thousands more scheduled for launch. Michael hopes to scatter the craft in orbit over the moon’s surface and use them to collect data.
6. A factory near Weston-super-Mare became the home of rocket-motor manufacturing company Bristol Aerojet in 1959, a collaboration between the Bristol Aeroplane Company in Filton and Aerojet from California. The company developed research rockets Skua and Petrel over a decade, starting in the late 1950s, and claimed they could be fired at under two-thirds the cost of other comparable rockets.
7. In 1964, work began on the design and manufacture of Black Arrow, a satellite carrier rocket. Part of the engines were developed by Bristol Aerojet, and in 1971 it launched Prospero, the first and to-date only British satellite to be put into orbit using a British vehicle.
8. Bristol is home to the UK’s first 3D planetarium at We The Curious in Millennium Square. Throughout the year, presenters give 30-minute shows about the stars and planets.
9. Bristol Spaceplanes, a business that has been based in Almonsdbury since 1991, is working to design planes to bring tourists into space at affordable prices. Managing director David Ashford co-wrote the first serious book on space tourism in 1990, predicting then that it could have been just 20 years away.
10. Aerospace Bristol museum in Filton is the final resting place of a Skylark, a type of research rocket that was used to take the first good-quality X-rays of the solar corona. From the start of the program in 1957 until its end in 2005, there were 441 Skylark launches from six sites across the world, including Abersystwyth in Wales. Sounding Rocket Services Ltd, a private company based in Fishponds, operated the Skylark vehicles from 1999.
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