Prospero is the only satellite launched by a British rocket

Prospero, launched on 28 October 1971 by a British Black Arrow rocket from Woomera, Australia, is the only satellite ever put into orbit by a British rocket. It made the United Kingdom the sixth nation to launch a satellite on its own launcher.

By then Britain had already cancelled the programme, and the rocket’s story runs from start to museum piece in a handful of dates:

• 1964: development begins under the Royal Aircraft Establishment, producing a three-stage rocket 13 metres tall.
• July 1971: three months before the flight, the government decides to drop its national launcher, but one last Black Arrow is still allowed to fly.
• 28 October 1971: Prospero reaches orbit.
• 1975: Britain helps set up the European Space Agency.
• 2000: the next Black Arrow, never launched, is hung from a gallery ceiling at London’s Science Museum.
• 2018: a first stage that had lain in the Australian desert for the best part of half a century is brought back to Britain.

The launch itself was a nervous wait. Before release, six small thrusters spun the third stage and satellite at three revolutions per second to keep them stable. Stations in Australia tracked the climb, but the teams knew the satellite was in orbit only when stations in Alaska picked up its signals about 40 minutes after launch. Until that moment it was simply X3; once in orbit it was renamed after the magician in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Prospero, built by the British Aircraft Corporation at Filton, near Bristol, was a technology test: new kinds of solar cells, surface finishes to control temperature, and new electronics technology. What followed sums up British launch policy: the next satellite in the experimental series, Miranda, went up on an American NASA Scout rocket.

Prospero is still circling Earth, and the Science Museum expects it to stay up for many more decades.