GREGOR BURNS

Schoolbag

Booster turnaround

Classroom windows

The crash

Rolling hills

The scarecrow between Easter and Wester Lethaven

On a clear night the vapour trails from the rockets would catch the light of the sun as they dispersed on the winds in the upper atmosphere, putting on a fantastic light show for those in the dark way below.

A road soaked after a brief summer shower leads up to one of the weather control devices

Music sounds better with you

Lost in space

There is one return pod that never made it back to earth. Either human error or a mechanical malfunction, LMG won’t say which, meant it overshot the re-entry window and entered an elliptical orbit around earth. With £3M worth of cargo onboard it was deemed not valuable enough to launch an intercept mission to recover it. There’s no rush anyway - the capsule is stable in that orbit for at least the next 10,000 years

The location of the guidance towers had to be very precise. It meant the government issuing compulsory purchase orders and a lot of unhappy residents.

The Drop Tower

The chamber inside the drop tower was pumped free of air, down to a near vacuum. This allowed them to do microgravity experiments in the brief time that the capsule fell. Even if you'd just looked at the tower seconds ago it would catch the corner of your eye and force you to look up at it again, and be surprised at how tall it was all over again. Likewise if you were looking the other way whilst in its presence it still always occupied a part of your consciousness, you never forgot it was there - always looming, always able to strike anywhere in the vicinity should it fall.

The Forest

He’d given up on trying to keep his feet dry long ago - his socks were soaked through. It was actually liberating, and walking in a straight line instead of jumping from dry patch to dry patch made him three times faster.

Power beaming

The massive power transfer arrays tracked the moon across the night sky, as the receiving dishes on the moon's surface did the same in return. Despite the terrible 18% transfer efficiency power beaming was still used as the primary source of power for the mining infrastructure.

There was a K7 prototype that lay in the forest west of the launch pad for years, as the insurance company argued over the cost of its removal.

A glide back booster gets towed back to the service depot to be turned around for another launch