Island Life Magazine Ltd February/March 2011 | Page 55

interview

Island Life - February/March 2011
Photo: A close-up of the test tower

testing the nose cone. We tested all
sorts of shapes and different materials.
Metal and shape were keys to the head,
with a variety of each tested before we
thought we had got it right.
“We assume we got it right, but
we never really knew because one
was never fired in anger,” smiled Ray.
“Basically Black Knight was built as
part of the stand-off defence. I suppose
we were telling the Russians ‘You send
weapons at us, and we will send them
back – we are ready for you’. It was a
very important part of our defensive
system, becaue if we hadn’t had it
available then they could have perhaps
invaded us. So we ran the test facility,
basically doing everything. We lit the
engines up and fired them and then
carried out typical manoeuvres of the
whole system.”
Testing was carried out by assembling
the rocket vertically in a tower and

fired with the exhaust going out
off Highdown and into the sea. On
ignition, the four jet rocket motors fired
into steel ‘exhaust buckets’, cooled by
a torrent of water from a specially built
60,000 gallon reservoir, at a rate of
3,000 gallons per minute. The exhaust
emerged at right angles from the cliff
as a fountain of steam.
“A lot of people thought that all the
‘smoke’ that came out was from the
rocket, but it wasn’t, in fact it was
water being poured on to the vehicle
to keep it cool,” explained Ray. “The
rocket was tied down, so as it was
tested it never left the ground.”
He recalls that one of the things he
did worry about was that in the centre
of the engine bay was a ball and claw,
to hold the rocket rigidly in place, and
if that ever structurally failed then
Bournemouth or Southampton would
have had a huge rocket heading their

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way!
During a test firing all activities
followed a strict time sequence, with
the operation of the rocket controlled
automatically by a sequencer unit. At
any point the process could be aborted
by the press of a button from several
monitoring positions, most of which
were underground. In addition to
manual observations taken from the
secure Blockhouse, an array of camera,
tape recorders and specialised devices
automatically logged data from several
hundred instrumentation sensors placed
within the engine and other rocket
systems.
In the early stages serious
consideration was given to
accommodating Blue Streak at the
Highdown site as well. But that would
have meant digging silos deep into
the hillside - impractical but not
impossible. As it was, development of
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