Forget Houston, I've been to Swindon

It comes as a surprise to many people that the UK has a Space Agency - but perhaps even more of a shock is where the British version of NASA is based - in sunny Swindon. Yes, it here that you find the headquarters of the UK Space Agency.

I went along there a couple of days ago with Mark O'Donnell of the BBC in our several week mission to boldly go where science and technology have had an impact in Wiltshire. After the likes of Porton Down, the Science Museum Library and Dyson I expected a rather dull trip. In the end, the Swindon centre is an administrative hub - there's no mission control or satellite building going on here. But in practice it was an engaging visit with a number of individuals for whom science and space are clearly a passion.

We interviewed three of the staff, including Dr David Williams, the acting chief executive, who is anything but your average stuffed shirt administrator. Part of the joy of the visit was the richness of the projects involved. There's a good mix of inward-looking satellite systems with immediate practical applications, and the outward looking work, with involvement in everything from Hubble to Planck, engaged in fundamental research on the nature of the universe.

Another role of the agency is education. They quite sensibly argue that there are two topics that effortlessly grab the attention of younger children - dinosaurs and space - and use space and satellites as a way of injecting excitement into anything from monitoring the decline of forests to geometry (through looking at how GPS works). They also have a set of goody boxes for schools containing bits of meteorite and slices of moon rock. I'd seen one of these before, but not quite so intimately. Funnily, the meteorites make more of an impact, because they are big, hefty lumps you can hold in your hand, where the moon samples are on glass slides and can't be touched.

In a final, rather engaging, chat we compared early influences - Dr David Parker of the Space Agency staff being fired up by a Magpie A-B-C of Space annual which he still proudly owns along with his album of space tea cards... the inevitable science fiction whether in books or the likes of Star Trek... building Airfix kits of rockets and space capsules... and even good old Patrick Moore.

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

Search This Blog