*
Not the most fun story to write. I don’t like covering poverty and misery. I mean, who does. It is important though. We have one of the lowest poverty rates in the country here, and so people tend to forget that each individual has a story, everyone feels the cold if they don’t have a roof, or even if they do have one if they can’t afford heating. If I want to change the world with my writing, I could do worse than stories like this.
Wednesday, March 26th 2014
This is it, deadline day. I have till the end of today to finish the third story, the Reaction Engines one. I’m enjoying writing it, but there’s a lot to cover. I know they won’t make it a front page story, IKEA already has that one covered in a big advert, but I’m crossing my fingers for page three. OK, no, before you say it, we don’t have that kind of page three in this newspaper! :-)
Evening
It isn’t finished. I can hand it in by 9am tomorrow ready for editing and printing tomorrow night. Nigel was nice about it, I think he understands, it’s my first week, and I’m new at deadlines. Lets face it, uni was a place we missed deadlines because we were too drunk to remember what the work was, let alone to hand it in on time. The worst we risked was a grade penalty, and the uni never wanted to do that, what with the league tables where they needed as many firsts as they could get to make them attractive to next years applicants.
I’ll be up late tonight. Coffee is on, cans of Red Bull in the fridge, it’s all-nighter time!
Thursday, March 27th 2014
It’s done. No sleep since yesterday morning. I think I hear Lord Lucan telling me where he’s been hiding all these years.
OK OK I’m not that out of it. I’m actually feeling quite alert. I know it won’t last, and a lot of it is the caffeine, but really, it isn’t too bad.
Just going to head into the office and drop off the article, and then back home to bed. I’ll transcribe it when I get up.
Friday, March 28th 2014
It’s very early. I’m using a keyboard instead of voice to record this entry, so I don’t wake Taima. Our flat is only small, and she’s a light sleeper.
So, the article is done, and probably right now is at the printers up in Oxford being printed into 4,000 copies of my writing. I’m hoping it hasn’t been edited too much, although I know they’ll have changed some things, after all, editors need to justify their jobs too. My editor is Debby Young, though she isn’t too young, mid-40’s I expect. Still, you know how it is, never ask a woman her age. Silly taboo if you ask me, but there is no way in hell I’m going to be the first to ask!
So, this is it before editing
Government holds out on innovative local company
The company Reaction Engines is no stranger to the people of Didcot and Abingdon. But what many do not realise is how small the company is. Working from a single unit in the Culham Science Centre, they are so dedicated to their work, that they make much more noise, and do more amazing things, than companies many times their size. The new Sabre engine they are developing is set to revolutionise space travel by dramatically reducing launch costs. The engine is hoped to be able to launch satellites and people into space for as little as 10% of the current price.
With their pioneering engine in the prototype stage, many have expected to see a new era of British space travel just around the corner. But yet the dates keep slipping. Two years ago, the prototype was hoped to be finished by now. Currently, the prototype is still at least eighteen months away.
“It’s a question of funding, mostly,” founder Alan Bond told the Didcot Gazette. “We’ve been promised financial assistance from the government, and from the ESA, but the money has trickled through very slowly. We’ve been attempting to obtain private investment, and while this has been a large portion of our funding, it’s proven harder than anticipated to obtain in the volume needed to make significant progress. Many of the big companies show an interest in the technology, but want to be able to control it before giving a large investment into its development.”
With the funding of the Sabre engine, and its vehicle, Skylon, looking to cost between £7bn and £8bn, this is a large amount of money to find from private investment. It is for projects like this that government investment is ideally suited.
The current climate of austerity, however, has led to many cutbacks in the funding of innovation. It has to be asked though, with a technology that could launch the UK back into the lead of the space industry, estimated to be worth around £150bn a year, why more investment isn’t being made to assist this local company. It doesn’t take a mathematician to realise this could be money well spent, and the benefits to the local economy could be huge, placing the south Oxfordshire area at the centre of a global industry, and creating hundreds, or more likely thousands of new jobs.
By time of publication, the government had not responded to our request for comment, and so we cannot say for sure why they are displaying such a lack of vision, but the damage to the local economy if this technology ends up overseas could be incalculable. A relatively modest investment here, now, in 2014, and within ten years, we could see a revolution in space technology that could not only put us back on the road to financial recovery, but it could really put the Great back into Great Britain.