Blue Streak – Success, Failure and … Extraterrestrials?

First designed as a ballistic missile, then adapted to launch satellites, Blue Streak was Britain’s contribution to the Space Race. First launched in 1964 at the Woomera test site in South Australia, Blue Streak performed as planned for eleven successful launches. Few rockets achieve such a clean record during the early stages of development. In fact, Blue Streak had a comparable success rate to the famous Saturn V rocket. Yet Blue Streak never became such a household name. Politics and economics conspired against Blue Streak and the programme was cancelled in 1971.

Yet for a brief moment in 1964, Blue Streak was thrust into the spotlight. This was not for its engineering pedigree, but for its unwitting connection to a mysterious photograph that captured the world’s imagination.

Cold War missile and European rocket

Blue Streak started life ten years earlier as a top secret military programme. With Cold War tensions high, Britain and the United States forged a plan to develop missiles that could reach targets within the Soviet Union. Britain called their missile Blue Streak. This followed the military’s ‘Rainbow Codes’ where each code name began with a colour, followed by a noun selected from a list. Blue Streak would carry a nuclear warhead, capable of mass destruction.

About 3,240 hectares of uninhabited moorland in Cumbria were chosen as the site for the Spadeadam Rocket Establishment. The role of this facility was to test each of the 60 Blue Streak missiles that the government intended to place in underground silos across the east of England. However, as Britain is only a small island, the silos would inevitably be located near towns and villages. This proximity would leave the local population vulnerable to nuclear attack. This fact combined with soaring costs caused enthusiasm for the project to wane before other silos were even built. Blue Streak as a missile was cancelled in 1960.

Eager not to let the technology go to waste, the British government explored ways to use Blue Streak to launch satellites. The European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO) was a collaborative effort to create a European rocket called Europa to rival the US and Soviet Union. Britain agreed to provide Blue Streak as the first stage, with France and Germany providing the second and third stages. The launch site was in Woomera, South Australia. Each country was responsible for the production of its own stage, so development of Blue Streak continued at Spadeadam.

Solway Spaceman

Meanwhile, on a summer’s day in 1964, a Carlisle fireman named Jim Templeton took a walk with his family on Burgh Marsh, overlooking the Solway Firth in Cumbria. This was just a few miles away from the Spadeadam Blue Streak test site. Being a keen photographer, Jim decided to stop and take a few snaps of his five-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. What he captured on film became famous across the world.

In just one of his photographs a mysterious figure looms behind Elizabeth, dressed all in white with what appears to be a helmet and visor. The figure’s appearance was a complete shock to Jim. He was adamant that his family were alone on the marsh and that his wife stood behind him out of shot. Jim shared the photograph with the local press. From there it escalated. It was picked up by national newspapers and even made the front page in Australia. The unexplained figure became known as the ‘Solway Spaceman.’

The fact that the ‘spaceman’ appeared close to the Blue Streak test site may seem an unremarkable detail, but Jim was soon to learn that this was not the only sighting. On the other side of the world at the Woomera launch site in Australia, a Blue Streak launch was reportedly aborted due to the presence of two unidentified figures on the firing range. Jim claimed to receive this information from a technician at Woomera. Having seen the Solway Spaceman on the front page, the technician was compelled to call Jim due to the striking resemblance it bore to the mysterious figures at Woomera.