Swans and Falcons

THE space age began as a competition. In the 1950s and 1960s America and the Soviet Union took rocketry from the age of the V2 to that of the Saturn V in a race first to build nuclear missiles, and then to put a man on the Moon. But when America did get to the Moon, the fire went out of the competition, and so did innovation. The only genuine novelty after 1970, the Space Shuttle, can be seen in hindsight for what it actually was: an answer to the question of how to keep America’s space programme going, rather than how to launch payloads cheaply and reliably.