Excerpt:
The inspiration for this site comes from two sources : an interview with Professor James of Reading University, and a life long interest in the space program. Whilst being interviewed by Prof James when applying for his M.A. course, we got on to the subject of Dan Dare [see my Eagle pages!], and one of the points that he made was that it was inherently improbable that the Spacefleet of the future would have been based in the U.K. - as he puts it in his book, "Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century" [Oxford], "it gave a whole generation of British boys ... a totally false impression that Britain was going to dominate the space race." Similarly, many writers who have tried to establish a Dan Dare timeline [such as Denis Steeper's "Report of the Crytos Commission"] have started a long way back. But I would submit that it was not inconceivable to Frank Hampson in 1949 to imagine that Britain, even it wouldn't "dominate the space race", would still be a considerable player.
Annotation:
This site covers the British space and rocketry program, actual and intended, over the years from 1950 to 1971 and is introduced by a lengthy essay about the history of these programs and about the site. Links here provide detailed information about specific rocket, rocket powered aircraft, and satellite projects, and includes primary government documents about the programs. Some of the program descriptions include useful chronologies. The History Today article "WHAT WENT WRONG WITH DAN DARE? (the failure of England's space program)" is also linked to here. Researchers should be aware that downloads from this site are slow from North America.