British Interplanetary Society: RIP?

[Orionblamblam]

AN OPEN LETTER FROM THE EXECUTIVE SECRETARY OF THE BIS
TO THE MEMBERSHIP

You will have read in the March 2011 edition of Spaceflight that
the Society has reached a turning point in its history. The
direction we take at this crossroads will decide the Society’s
future, or perhaps more aptly whether the Society has a future
at all. One direction leads to the continuation of the BIS as a
guiding force in the world of astronautics; the other leads to the
winding-up of the BIS, or at best to a scaled down and much
less influential version of the Society to which you belong.

Which direction we take very much now depends on you. It is
no longer enough just to be a member of the British
Interplanetary Society. What we need now is your active
participation and support. Without this the Society will close
within 12 months.

Well, that would suck.

 

[CNH]

I know what you mean but ...

The BIS has, in many ways, been its own worst enemy. It is incredibly bureaucratic. There is a lot of infighting. Some of the events it has organised have been very worthwhile, but I got the feeling that some of them went ahead in spite of the BIS rather than because of the BIS. Spaceflight is a very impressive journal. Apart from that, can anyone point to anything useful the Society has done in the last 10 years?

 

[Michel Van]

Apart from that, can anyone point to anything useful the Society has done in the last 10 years?

2006 Project Boreas feasibility study for manned Mars Base at Marspole

Project Boreas - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

and they work on advance version of Project Daedalus: Icarus
this in collaboration with the Tau Zero Foundation

 

[CNH]

The Society might do studies like that, but it is very bad at spreading the word. I doubt if many other people on the forum would know about it without that link.

 

[Nik]

Oops...

I've been a BIS member since ~1979 thanks to an unhealthy interest in nearby stars and their then-hypothetical extrasolar planets, but I've only managed to attend a couple of meetings-- One for the Daedalus final report, where I got my copy autographed, and one between visiting kin in hospital...

The unseemly internal squabbles and wrangles didn't help: I stayed out of such petty politics, felt glad to be far enough away to be 'clean'...

IMHO, the root cause of the malaise was NASA and its fixation on the Shuttle.

That project ran a dire decade late, ran horribly over budget and didn't even run on time-- I still remember predictions of a few weeks turn-around, a peroptimism that now seems laughable rather than utterly absurd...

NASA's bureaucracy were not open to outside suggestions that clashed with their style, and woe betide any who dared flout the rule: Saturn-5 ? Old tech, no need for *that* junk any more, the Shuttle WILL RULE SUPREME !! Meanwhile, the USSR did their own thing, the Japanese had two under-funded rival agencies and the hapless Brazilians had a ghastly pad accident which crippled their dreams...

Some-when, some-how, the EU's ESA leveraged themselves into major, if un-manned players. Then like the Japanese, they made a deal with the devil: They'd build modules, the Shuttles would deliver. But they didn't, until their last few flights *ever*, forcing ESA to design and build their own cargo delivery system...

Okay, the valiant Voyagers are *still* returning data, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn probes have returned jaw-dropping science, but *no-one* has been further than Hubble since the last Apollo mission...

Hard to keep up the interest in 'manned spaceflight'...

Hard to see how interest in further horizons could endure when even controlled fusion stayed a decade away, and the AI required for long missions remained a mirage...

Me, bitter ?? Yeah...

I don't remember reading the last dozen 'Spaceflight' issues, some stayed in their bags for several months before, bored, I glanced through them. I've thought of cancelling, but I still felt enough loyalty to keep going-- Just !!

The irony is that, with NASA stripped of power, in no small part due to its navel-gazing, 'retro' plans, the private sector is *finally* coming through. Also, the Chinese have weighed in with long-term plans, followed by the Indians. Real soon, there'll be a bunch of entrepreneurs and states with the outward urge...

Another irony is that extrasolar planets have gone from outré speculation to a zoo: I remember Peter van der Kamp's sad retraction of his 'possible' astrometry detection of something sub-stellar around Barnard's Star. Turned out to be instrument error, due to a repair done a decade (!!) previously...

And now there are *hundreds* of candidates in even one small window, suggesting every star from F5 downwards that isn't a close multiple probably has several planets. It's reached the point where funding for the Terrestrial Planet Finder is almost certain...

As I see it, this is 'bottom dead centre' for the BIS: They must fold, or re-invent themselves and fly...

Nik
BSc FBIS

 

[Mercurius Cantabrigiensis]

I used to be a member (associate fellow, I think) of the BIS in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some of what the BIS did in those days was good – I recall for example the double issue of the journal circa 1960 documenting the then state-of-the-art on liquid hydrogen propulsion. But much was of marginal competence.

For example, when one of the early Ranger moon probes experienced a crippling electronics failure, subsequent issues of Aviation Week carried detailed reports on the post-flight analysis, showing how the fault was tracked down to a system, then a subsystem, then to detailed component level. It made fascinating reading.

When the same mission was reported in Spaceflight, what appeared seemed little more than a quick text compiled from newspaper accounts, which added nothing to what the interested reader would not already have learned from his daily broadsheet newspaper.

Being a bit short of money in those days, I decided that a subscription to Aviation Week would be a better investment than renewing my subscription.

A couple of years ago I bought their book on Blue Streak and the ELDO satellite launch vehicle. and found it to be the same sort of ‘mixed bag’ that I recalled from almost half a century earlier. For example, I was amused to note that its listing of the engineers who had worked on the programme had failed to list all but a couple of those that I’d met.

In the words of one old Blue Streak engineer, “The departmental heads and section leaders had duly remembered the names of their fellow departmental heads and section leaders, but no-one seemed to have remembered the engineers who had worked under them, apart from a few of the more colourful characters. None of the engineers had had worked in my department were listed, only the final departmental head.”

Like some of the faded colour photos that could swiftly have been colour-corrected in Photoshop, this may have been a failing on the author rather than the BIS, but neither deficiency was a great advertisement for the society.

 

[Nik]

For the record, we down-sized not long after my post #5. I cancelled my membership with great reluctance but, apart from 'Interstellar Studies', there was nothing of interest for six months at a time...


End of an era...

 

[PMN1]

While the Spaceflight Magazine is still coming out, there has been very little in the JBIS or other magazines in the past few years or at least from what I can see when logging on and going into the shop.

 

[sferrin]

I used to be a member (associate fellow, I think) of the BIS in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Some of what the BIS did in those days was good – I recall for example the double issue of the journal circa 1960 documenting the then state-of-the-art on liquid hydrogen propulsion. But much was of marginal competence.

For example, when one of the early Ranger moon probes experienced a crippling electronics failure, subsequent issues of Aviation Week carried detailed reports on the post-flight analysis, showing how the fault was tracked down to a system, then a subsystem, then to detailed component level. It made fascinating reading.

Aviation Week has gone the way of "Scientific" American over the years.

 

[pathology_doc]

Once the Russians and the Americans had put satellites and then men (and the occasional Russian woman) in space, the BIS ceased to have a reason to exist. You need national-level funding to do what they hoped to do, and unless the BIS had LITERALLY been given Woomera and a blank cheque, they would never have amounted to anything.

Sadly, the Golden-Age sci-fi dream of the gifted inventor who builds an interplanetary or interstellar rocket in his back shed never came true. It was never realistic, except in the case of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Richard Seaton, and even Seaton could only do it because he was already best friends with Martin Crane, an engineer-turned-industrialist with essentially bottomless pockets. It might be argued that Elon Musk is Seaton and Crane all in the one person, but even then he's not the private citizen who beat the nations into space.

 

[sferrin]

Once the Russians and the Americans had put satellites and then men (and the occasional Russian woman) in space, the BIS ceased to have a reason to exist. You need national-level funding to do what they hoped to do, and unless the BIS had LITERALLY been given Woomera and a blank cheque, they would never have amounted to anything.

Sadly, the Golden-Age sci-fi dream of the gifted inventor who builds an interplanetary or interstellar rocket in his back shed never came true. It was never realistic, except in the case of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Richard Seaton, and even Seaton could only do it because he was already best friends with Martin Crane, an engineer-turned-industrialist with essentially bottomless pockets. It might be argued that Elon Musk is Seaton and Crane all in the one person, but even then he's not the private citizen who beat the nations into space.

The first Starship configuration always makes me think of the Golden-Age.

 

[Michel Van]

Now 12 years has past since first Post
and the British Interplanetary Society still exist and thrive
yes most of theoretical work was done in last 85 years
but there still open question and new ideas

BIS work for moment on those Projects:
Project Icarus: Son of Daedalus (interstellar probe)
The SPACE project: the Re-examine the Space Colonies studies, led by Gerard O’Neill in the 1970s.
Project Q-Cube: viable education satellite projects for secondary school pupils and undergraduate students.
The ‘Tokamak Nuclear Electric Propulsion’ project, study how to do modifications to terrestrial fusion power plant for Ion engines.

 

[FighterJock]

The BIS project that I am most looking forward to with the papers getting published is Project Icarus, indeed I have followed it since the first papers were published in the Journal way back in 2009.

 

[pathology_doc]

Once the Russians and the Americans had put satellites and then men (and the occasional Russian woman) in space, the BIS ceased to have a reason to exist. You need national-level funding to do what they hoped to do, and unless the BIS had LITERALLY been given Woomera and a blank cheque, they would never have amounted to anything.

Sadly, the Golden-Age sci-fi dream of the gifted inventor who builds an interplanetary or interstellar rocket in his back shed never came true. It was never realistic, except in the case of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Richard Seaton, and even Seaton could only do it because he was already best friends with Martin Crane, an engineer-turned-industrialist with essentially bottomless pockets. It might be argued that Elon Musk is Seaton and Crane all in the one person, but even then he's not the private citizen who beat the nations into space.

The first Starship configuration always makes me think of the Golden-Age.


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Makes me suspect that Elon Musk absorbed a lot of golden-age stuff and asked himself, "Can I bring this to reality?"

For obvious reasons, VTOL is mandatory for any planetary landing (incl. the Moon, Mars, Jovian moons etc.) for the foreseeable future. Even if you could get a Space Shuttle to the Moon, a landing would have had to be made by a separate craft.