Post by rberman on Dec 15, 2018 15:29:16 GMT -5
Ministry of Space Chapter 1 (April 2001)
Creative Team: Written by Warren Ellis. Art by Chris Weston.
2001 Story: Officer Lucy Langston flies her VTOL plane from home to Sir John Dashwood’s office at Lowlands University. She informs him that the United States is finally going to launch a spacecraft. Lois takes Dashwood to Churchill Station in Earth orbit.
Flashback Story: British forces take custody of Germany’s rocket engineers and level the Peenemunde research facility in which they were working. This proves unfortunate for the company of American soldiers which just occupied the empty facility.
Air Commodore Dashwood convinces Winston Churchill to invest in space tech as the likely means of future warfare. A mysterious source of “black budget” funding will finance the operation.
With the aid of German know-how, Britain has advanced rockets in 1946 and an artificial satellite orbiting Earth in 1948. Dashwood presses the German scientists to have a space plane ready for him to fly by 1950; he’s willing to trade safety checks for rapid deployment. Launching the experimental craft himself from the undercarriage of a larger plane, his ascent goes smoothly and gloriously. But he loses control on the way back down, surviving the crash as a cripple.
Ministry of Space Chapter 2 (September 2001)
2001 Story: Dashwood arrives on Churchill Station and is alarmed to hear that the Americans have learned the origin of the British space program’s funding fifty years prior.
Flashback Story: Dashwood recovers from his spaceship crash in the hospital, both legs amputated below the knee; he will soon have aluminum prosthetics to allow walking, but his days as a test pilot are over. He argues with the German scientist who had warned him that the program was not ready for a manned launch.
In 1952, Dashwood meets the dying King George VI. In 1953, Britain begins launching a series of three-stage rockets, with the middle stages left in orbit to link together into a space station. By 1957, a rocket is departing that station for a successful lunar landing.
Ministry of Space Chapter 3 (April 2004—why the big gap?)
2001 Story: The Americans know that the Ministry of Space was funded with raubgold, money stolen by Nazi Germany from Holocaust victims. They threaten to reveal this to the world unless Britain permits the United States to send its own ships to the moon. Before a board of inquiry, Dashwood admits ordering the airstrike on Peenemunde that killed an American army unit. He obliquely refers to the concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz as well, though it’s not clear whether he was complicit in their genocidal operations or merely profited from their existence after the fact.
Flashback Story: In 1960, the skies of London are filled with quinjets and kids wearing helicopter backpacks, fruits of the scientific discoveries of the British space program. The Lunar base Victoria finds traces of water on the moon. In 1962, a disaster strikes an experimental single-stage spaceship launching from Australia. Dashwood had warned his colleague Bridge against this design; now Bridge perishes in the explosion of the vessel’s fission reactor.
In 1969, Captain Langston, father of newly born Lucy, is among those departing on Britain’s grandest project yet: A fleet arrives in Martian orbit and releases dozens of landing craft, each carrying dozens of colonists. The Union Jack is planted in the Martian soil.
2001 Story: The British Empire includes manned missions to Saturn, hydroponic colonies on Mars, a city spreading across the face of the moon, and ring colonies in near Earth orbit. But black officer Lucy Langston is still consigned to using the lounge room for “non-white women staff.”
My Two Cents: Warren Ellis intended this series to homage Frank Hampson’s 1950s space adventure comic series Dan Dare. Enchanted by the thought of a space race which Britain won, Ellis here fills out the gaps to show it happening. It’s an unusual series without a conventional conflict. The characters are true challengers of the unknown, overcoming one engineering and political obstacle after another with a sense of Atomic Age inevitability.
In the real world, Americans secured Wernher Von Braun and other leading German ballistic scientists as part of “Operation Paperclip.” In the real world, America conducted numerous bombing raids, flattening 75% of the Peenemunde facility before the Soviets took control of it. In the real world, Britain was a wrecked economy after WW2 with neither the means nor will to look to the stars. In the real world, Von Braun’s 1952 manifesto Das Marsprojekt goes unfulfilled.
Ellis asks: Why? What obstacles lie between here and there? What technical advances of the last sixty years would make the task easier? What technical advances would we enjoy today if the world had not lost interest in the space race after the first Apollo landing? As Ellis says in the collected edition’s afterword, “We should have gone so much further by now.”
The build-up to the Nazi gold revelation is less stirring, though British complicity in the actual Holocaust would have been a shocker. Looking at the last panel depicting the segregated lounge, I realize that I don’t know much about segregation policies in twentieth century Britain. Lacking a local history of endemic race-based slavery in the American fashion, did Britain ever have such systemic segregation? If so, when and how did it end?
Codystarbuck wrote about this series here.
Creative Team: Written by Warren Ellis. Art by Chris Weston.
2001 Story: Officer Lucy Langston flies her VTOL plane from home to Sir John Dashwood’s office at Lowlands University. She informs him that the United States is finally going to launch a spacecraft. Lois takes Dashwood to Churchill Station in Earth orbit.
Flashback Story: British forces take custody of Germany’s rocket engineers and level the Peenemunde research facility in which they were working. This proves unfortunate for the company of American soldiers which just occupied the empty facility.
Air Commodore Dashwood convinces Winston Churchill to invest in space tech as the likely means of future warfare. A mysterious source of “black budget” funding will finance the operation.
With the aid of German know-how, Britain has advanced rockets in 1946 and an artificial satellite orbiting Earth in 1948. Dashwood presses the German scientists to have a space plane ready for him to fly by 1950; he’s willing to trade safety checks for rapid deployment. Launching the experimental craft himself from the undercarriage of a larger plane, his ascent goes smoothly and gloriously. But he loses control on the way back down, surviving the crash as a cripple.
Ministry of Space Chapter 2 (September 2001)
2001 Story: Dashwood arrives on Churchill Station and is alarmed to hear that the Americans have learned the origin of the British space program’s funding fifty years prior.
Flashback Story: Dashwood recovers from his spaceship crash in the hospital, both legs amputated below the knee; he will soon have aluminum prosthetics to allow walking, but his days as a test pilot are over. He argues with the German scientist who had warned him that the program was not ready for a manned launch.
In 1952, Dashwood meets the dying King George VI. In 1953, Britain begins launching a series of three-stage rockets, with the middle stages left in orbit to link together into a space station. By 1957, a rocket is departing that station for a successful lunar landing.
Ministry of Space Chapter 3 (April 2004—why the big gap?)
2001 Story: The Americans know that the Ministry of Space was funded with raubgold, money stolen by Nazi Germany from Holocaust victims. They threaten to reveal this to the world unless Britain permits the United States to send its own ships to the moon. Before a board of inquiry, Dashwood admits ordering the airstrike on Peenemunde that killed an American army unit. He obliquely refers to the concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz as well, though it’s not clear whether he was complicit in their genocidal operations or merely profited from their existence after the fact.
Flashback Story: In 1960, the skies of London are filled with quinjets and kids wearing helicopter backpacks, fruits of the scientific discoveries of the British space program. The Lunar base Victoria finds traces of water on the moon. In 1962, a disaster strikes an experimental single-stage spaceship launching from Australia. Dashwood had warned his colleague Bridge against this design; now Bridge perishes in the explosion of the vessel’s fission reactor.
In 1969, Captain Langston, father of newly born Lucy, is among those departing on Britain’s grandest project yet: A fleet arrives in Martian orbit and releases dozens of landing craft, each carrying dozens of colonists. The Union Jack is planted in the Martian soil.
2001 Story: The British Empire includes manned missions to Saturn, hydroponic colonies on Mars, a city spreading across the face of the moon, and ring colonies in near Earth orbit. But black officer Lucy Langston is still consigned to using the lounge room for “non-white women staff.”
My Two Cents: Warren Ellis intended this series to homage Frank Hampson’s 1950s space adventure comic series Dan Dare. Enchanted by the thought of a space race which Britain won, Ellis here fills out the gaps to show it happening. It’s an unusual series without a conventional conflict. The characters are true challengers of the unknown, overcoming one engineering and political obstacle after another with a sense of Atomic Age inevitability.
In the real world, Americans secured Wernher Von Braun and other leading German ballistic scientists as part of “Operation Paperclip.” In the real world, America conducted numerous bombing raids, flattening 75% of the Peenemunde facility before the Soviets took control of it. In the real world, Britain was a wrecked economy after WW2 with neither the means nor will to look to the stars. In the real world, Von Braun’s 1952 manifesto Das Marsprojekt goes unfulfilled.
Ellis asks: Why? What obstacles lie between here and there? What technical advances of the last sixty years would make the task easier? What technical advances would we enjoy today if the world had not lost interest in the space race after the first Apollo landing? As Ellis says in the collected edition’s afterword, “We should have gone so much further by now.”
The build-up to the Nazi gold revelation is less stirring, though British complicity in the actual Holocaust would have been a shocker. Looking at the last panel depicting the segregated lounge, I realize that I don’t know much about segregation policies in twentieth century Britain. Lacking a local history of endemic race-based slavery in the American fashion, did Britain ever have such systemic segregation? If so, when and how did it end?
Codystarbuck wrote about this series here.
