Stuff Matters: Genius, Risk and the Secret of Capitalism. Harry Bingham

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СКАЧАТЬ for the fertility of its ideas, it was hard to fault the company there either. Not being an engineer myself, I don’t understand half the things the company does, but I do know that when the ‘Current Projects’ tab on a company’s website lists eight major projects, the last but one of which is entitled simply ‘Orbital Base Station’, then I know I’ve found a winner. I made some phone calls, and before too long I was on my way to see the company’s managing director and chief technologist.

      His name was Bond, Alan Bond.

      If I was expecting something out of an old Sean Connery movie, then the business park where the company had its head-quarters was hardly disappointing. Showing my identity documents at the gate, I drove slowly through a campus where the signs all said things like ‘FCS Forensics’, ‘ABSL Space Products’, or ‘Culham Electromagnetics and Lightning’. One large and windowless building was adorned with a sign that simply read ‘nuclear fusion’. All that was needed to complete a Connery-era stage set was a mag-lev monorail, some tanks full of bubbling liquid and lots of bad guys in easily identifiable bad-guy suits.

      Alas – or fortunately, depending on taste – these thoughts were quickly dispelled. Alan Bond came bounding to meet me at the door to his offices. ‘What’s the time? Eleven. Ha! You’re just in time for cake.’ In a scene that was more Wallace and Gromit than Doctor No, the company’s finest bundled into a conference room to raid the tea trolley and carry away piles of stodgy baked goods. Over tea and (in Bond’s case) a squidgy appley-creamy thing, he started to tell me about his career and his company.

      His interest in space began at the age of about 4, when he first encountered the ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ nursery rhyme. He asked his father – a fitter – what stars were and his father took him outside to introduce him to the concept of outer space. The boy was entranced. At age 8, he came across the exploits of Dan Dare, ‘Pilot of the Future’. A lifetime’s obsession was born.

      He studied maths, joined the aerospace company Rolls Royce and began to learn what real engineering was all about. Still in love with the idea of space, he managed to get himself assigned to the most interesting projects going. He worked on the RZ2 rocket engine that powered Blue Streak nuclear missiles and (later) satellite launchers. He became section leader of the cryogenic performance office, which meant messing around with the complex thermodynamics of burning liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen.

      He was good enough at what he did that for four years he found himself working for a British weapons programme, which he can’t say much about even now and couldn’t talk about at all at the time. He also worked with the British Interplanetary Society to design a plausible unmanned starship. Since the design involved helium-based nuclear fusion, and since a shortage of helium on earth was to be overcome by sending robot factories to Jupiter to extract the stuff from the Jovian atmosphere, and since those factories were to operate for twenty years while suspended from hot air balloons, then it’s probably not unfair to suggest that the notion of ‘plausible’ in interstellar transport design is still somewhat elastic.

      To his relief, his stint at the weapons programme ended. Bond messed around in the world of nuclear fusion for a while, then became closely involved with a British Aerospace/Rolls Royce programme to design an air-breathing, single-stage, reusable satellite launch vehicle, named HOTOL. It was the project which Bond had been dreaming about. In the inevitable way of such things, the engineers worked hard, drew up designs, came across problems…and the government and the project’s two commercial backers got cold feet and withdrew. It was Bond’s moment of truth, the equivalent for him of those lumps of glittering stone brought to Knox D’Arcy by a trio of wild-eyed miners.

      He had two choices. He could do what he’d spent his life doing up to this point, working with some of the world’s most technologically advanced companies and agencies, doing the things that they wanted him to do. Or he could do what he had wanted to do ever since he’d first encountered Dan Dare: he could strike out on his own to design and build a spaceship. Reason and good sense pointed in one direction. Passion and conviction pointed in the other. There was no contest. Bond had money in the bank from having sold a crucial patent to Rolls Royce. Using that cash, and in the company of two rocket-scientist colleagues, Bond set up Reaction Engines.

      For a while the company lived hand to mouth, selling bits of consultancy, living off capital, but at the same time managing to revise the old HOTOL design in a number of crucial respects. The difficult thing about building an air-breathing engine is that air heats up as it’s compressed. At Mach 5.5, the heat generated is sufficient to melt any normal engine. Bond’s design gets around this problem by using liquid hydrogen to cool the air. In a cunning move, the heat stolen from the air is then used to power other bits of the engine. The result is stunningly efficient. Provisional calculations suggest that the thrust to weight ratio is about fourteen times, or about three times better than regular jet engines and about seven times better than scramjets (another innovative propulsion technology currently in development elsewhere). Private investors began to get interested and funded further work. The European Space Agency has donated money too. By 2012, the company hopes to be well beyond the proof-of-concept stage for every element of their design. From that point on, they’ll be busy with the slow and expensive business of turning engineering drawings into cost-effective, space-going reality.

      I don’t know if that rocket will ever fly. I hope it does, but slipping the surly bonds of earth isn’t easy, cheap, or riskless, to put it mildly. I do know, however, that Alan Bond is an extraordinary individual, one of the few authentic geniuses I’ve ever met, perhaps the only one. If SKYLON flies, Bond (who is no spring chicken and may not live to see it happen) will become one of the most famous inventors in world history. If it doesn’t – well, he’ll still be a genius and rocket scientists of the world will always know it.

      But his company is not a company. He is not an entrepreneur. He does not, if truth be told, belong in the pages of this book.

      To be sure, Reaction Engines is, legally speaking, a limited liability company registered at Companies House. It has a board and sets of accounts and everything that the law requires. But companies are there to make money. Reaction Engines is there to build something amazing. In due course, if it gets it right, it’ll create a huge amount of value. Some people will get rich off the back of it. But none of those involved with it today care about the money. Bond himself doesn’t give a damn. Even the private investors who have part-funded the project are doing so because they want to do something extraordinary, not in the expectation of any near-term return. Investors whose motivations are coldly commercial have stayed away from the project and will continue to stay away until the technology is a lot closer to being proven. A former colleague of Bond’s told him sadly that SKYLON would ‘fly higher and faster’ than anything Rolls Royce could plausibly invest in. That phrase could be used to summarize the position of industry generally towards any genuinely cutting edge research. High and fast is not where money is reliably made.

      From high and fast to noisy and slow.

      Not long after seeing Bond, I met up with a man called Paul Luen, the CEO and founder of a small, innovative marine safety company, Martek Marine. Like Bond, Paul Luen came from a fairly humble background. Like Bond, he got an excellent degree in a tough discipline (chemistry, in Luen’s case). Like Bond, he ended up knocking around in the kind of companies that could make use of intelligence and drive. Unlike Bond, however, Luen had an interest in making money. He worked in sales, not product development. When the opportunity arose to invest money in the company he was working for, he borrowed £10,000 and made the investment. He worked hard selling gas-detection equipment to industrial users. The company had a handful of customers in the shipping business, but not many; its focus lay elsewhere.

      Then Paul noticed that the shipping industry was gradually tightening up its somewhat antiquated safety rules. The new rules would impose higher standards on, among other things, gas detection СКАЧАТЬ