Like many long-established broadcasters, the BBC put out a selection of their archive material for us all to enjoy online. Their most recent may be of interest to Hackaday readers and has more than a bit of personal interest to your scribe, as it visits the Spadeadam rocket test range on the event of its closure in 1973. This marked the final chapter in the story of Blue Streak, the British intercontinental missile project that later became part of the first European space launcher.
It’s possible citizens of every country see their government as uniquely talented in the throwing away of taxpayer’s money, but the sad story here isn’t in Blue Streak itself which was obsolete as a missile by the time it was finished. Instead it lies in the closure of the test range as part of the ill-advised destruction of a nascent and successful space industry, just as it had made the UK the third nation to have successfully placed a satellite in orbit.
We normally write in the second person in our daily posts here at Hackaday, but for now there’s a rare switch into the first person. My dad spent a large part of the 1950s working as a technician for de Haviland Propellers, later part of Hawker Siddeley, and then British Aerospace. He was part of the team working on Blue Streak at Spadeadam and the other test site at RAF Westcott in Buckinghamshire, and we were brought up on hair-raising tales of near-disasters in the race to get British nukes flying. He’s not one of the guys in the video below, as by that time he was running his metalwork business in Oxfordshire, but I certainly recognise the feeling of lost potential they express. Chances are I’ll never visit what remains of the Spadeadam test stands in person as the site is now the UK’s electronic warfare test range, so the BBC film represents a rare chance for a closer look.
In a related story, the trackers for the same program in Australia were saved from the scrapheap.
Damn, that video was as great as it was a bummer. Wonder how those gents got on afterwards.
Sounds like classic British incompetence strikes again. Cough cough Windscale Pile 1.
“We normally write in the third person in our daily posts here at Hackaday” Do they?
It isn’t just space professionals
Civil engineers (you know, pothole fillers, levee fixers, etc) have a hard enough time of it.
The Right hates public works/FDR infrastructure–wanting tax breaks for the Cabots and the Lodges.
The Greenie/Left ALSO hates public works…going on and on about levees, wetlands, racist bridges–and want money for social programs.
Long before Mythbusters, Discovery had a documentary called “Hurricane X” where disaster researchers tried to warn folks about what would be called Katrina –which both cost taxpayers more on repair than prevention –and became a greater environmental disaster than simply fixing flood controls. You either keep them in repair–or remove them.
Then some robes attacked the Army Corp of engineers.
Now–that’s public works, mind you.
Space professionals have it even worse.
With NASA underfunded, you have to work under tech-brahs.
China and Russian Chief Designers didn’t have to beg Mr. Wonderful on SHARK TANK at least.
The Brits have lost their way
I’ve read this with a heavy british accent after watching the video.
Indeed. They each have their own special way to keep the trend for government spending per GDP pointing upwards. With the total tax burden in most countries now hovering around 50%, it’s rather difficult to say whether it’s taxpayer money they’re spending anymore, or whether it’s more about taxing their own spending and then re-spending it.
Fortunately the latter problem can be solved by simply taking on more debt.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1dloy1t/government_spending_as_a_percentage_of_gdp_1800/
Which raises an interesting question. If the total tax burden happens to be 50% and the government spends it all, then they would almost immediately collect 50% of what they spend back in taxes. After all, things like government pensions, unemployment compensations are also taxed as income, or when someone on social aid buys stuff they pay VAT or sales tax. When the government buys anything off the private market, they collect business tax from the money they just spent.
So, the government is taxing the economy to the tune of 50% all combined, and when they spend that money back on the economy they’re really only giving half of the money – because they’re yanking the other half right back to themselves in taxes.
That means, for every 4 units of money in the economy, 2 goes to the government in taxes, and the government gives back 1 unit in spending after taxes. It looks like the government should be gaining money year on year, but no government actually does. Instead they’re all failing to meet their spending budgets by taxation and have to borrow more.
So the question is, where does that one quarter of the GDP actually go? Who gets it? Obviously it’s going somewhere that taxes can’t touch, otherwise the government would get it back.
It’s amusing how they all seem to be in debt to eachother, yet somehow the total doesn’t tally. They print more at the push of a button, devaluing what’s already circulating. Money stopped being an IOU a long time ago, it seems to be more of a way to control the speed of things and keep track of what’s happening now.
It looks like an interesting little R&D company, it would be a couple of hours commute for me. If it paid enough to live on, I’d take a job sweeping the floor, just to be a part of that.
Interest on government debt is “only” 3-5% of GDP in most countries. It doesn’t explain where the missing quarter is all vanishing.
Sure, money is like a tracking instrument.
That’s why cash is so important to democracy, also.
It can’t be tracked as easily as digital money and allows for a bit of anonymity.
“Instead they’re all failing to meet their spending budgets by taxation and have to borrow more.”
Minsky Introduction Video (2:28)
ProfSteveKeen
Apr 6, 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIP7ES1lCGk
There is no incentive to fix that ABSOLUTELY SIMPLISTIC GARBAGE theory which causes boom-bust cycles and huge national debts because it benefits those in positions of power adequate to change it: the wealthiest gain by asset inflation during the boom and can buy real assets at fire sale prices during the bust and politicians can borrow to pay for benefits not supported by tax receipts. For the wealthiest, it’s a two steps forward (boom), one step back (bust) ratcheting process.
“Boom-bust cycles tend to exacerbate wealth concentration because of asymmetric exposure to assets, differential recovery speeds, and policy biases.”
Prof. Steven Keen has apparently faded away.
To make matters worse, garbage data manipulated for political reasons (like CPI) is used as inputs into the garbage models created from that garbage theory. Garbage cubed. That is explained in this great book that was released right after the massive sub-prime mortgage fraud which led to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC): Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve (February 6, 2008).
If anyone hasn’t seen the great film, “The Big Short” about the MASSIVE fraud that led to the GFC, you should.
LEGAL freeview (with ads) of that film on Pluto TV:
https://pluto.tv/us/on-demand/movies/5c6c865dbb225fd2ebadbfc3
You could have simplified that by, “Privatize the profit, socialize the loss.” Corporations run losing strategies for short term gains because the state has made it their business to pick the corporations up to avoid greater harm. That’s a result of the government taking the role of the “moderator” of the economy over simply setting and judging the law.
The only thing worse is “Socialize the profit, privatize the loss.”. That’s when the state takes all the surplus generated by the economy and spends it on itself (the political elite), and sends people to the gulag when they fail to meet arbitrary productivity demands. What? Did you think the state that controls the economy was actually the people?
I naively suspect the quarter of the GDP goes into inflation bubble, never to be seen again.
The actual total tax burden in the EU is not quite 50% yet, but it’s getting there.
https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/08/26/tax-revenue-as-a-share-of-gdp-in-europe-which-countries-collect-the-most
EU average 40%. I think Sweden or Denmark hit 50% in the early 2000’s, reaching the point where there was almost more government than economy to be taxed.
Why “total tax burden”? Taxes are our friend, just like fear is.
Taxes are only a burden if they aren’t put to good use, not used in the interest of the citizens.
Taxes as such are a good instrument, I think, as long as they are spent for humanitary things.
Such as investing in non car-centric city planning, public health care, environmental protection,
barrier-free cities (accessibility), better support for disabled people (road lights with sound, for the visually impaired).
If 40% of the GDP is tax, and the government is using the money to cause 40% of GDP, then the government ends up taxing itself 40% of the 40% which is 16% of GDP.
That means 16% of all prices is just the government being pointless. They’re collecting tax to pay people so the people could pay the tax.
Increasing the total tax burden to 50% would net the government 25% instead of 24% of GDP actually useful tax revenue, but it would also make prices 25% inflated by tax alone. There’s a sharp increase in the inefficiency of taxation and the inflation effect when you approach 50% total tax burden, and equally a sharp decrease when you back off away from it.
But of course governments want to maximize their tax revenue, even when reducing it would give greater benefits to the people and grow the GDP more, which would lead to greater tax revenues even at the lower rate…
IMHO those “pointless” taxes on government handouts being taxed are not going into the nether and return back as more taxes.
Which means more things can be created, public housing, sustainable cities, etc.
In the US we went with the reverse and that experiment showed just how terrible privately hoarded tax-financed profits can be. Corporations regularly collect tax-financed freebies (Farmer Bill, Infrastructure Bill, etc etc) and pocket these tax-free, so in very real sense we are being profit-strip-mined with no tangible return in place.
I still think EU has the right idea and taxing for-profit private entities at 40% minimum is a good idea. That way no entity grows too large and takes over government functions, which is exactly what has been happening in the US, some corporations are governments in themselves and no regulating agency can be bold enough to tell them otherwise. (example – presently ten largest banks run more than 3/4 of the US economy as their private backyard because they privately own all the assets, land, etc, those the “too large to fail” kinds that nobody can challenge).
Cool! The 60s era control panels remimd me of old nuc. power plants from former East Germany.
They look like probs from a vintage science-fiction film.
Exanple: https://deutsches-elektromuseum.de/2017/02/ehemaliges-kernkraftwerk-lubmin/
This one has an warmer ambience: https://www.gettyimages.es/fotos/rheinsberg-nuclear-power-plant
There’s a great book about this and a few other projects called “The Backroom Boys” by Francis Spufford, well worth a read – the section on Blue Streak is very good.
I think I read that the UK is the only country to have ever given up the capability of launching satellites once it had it.