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Unlike Germany and Russia, the British had a severe handicap in the rocketry world. Unlike countries like Russia, France, Germany, and America, the British had no central figure to rally around. Further compounding this handicap was the fact that the government was quite hostile to rocketry. The government enforced the Explosives Act of 1875 in order to discourage it. The British rocket experimenters, however, decided to work around these discouragements by concentrating on public education and literary publishing.
To achieve this goal, British rocketry pioneers founded the British Interplanetary Society. This society's Journal, "The the BIS journal" soon became the world's most respected space flight journal. Also, in 1936, one of the best written of the first books on rocketry was published. This was the British book Rockets through space: The Dawn of Interplanetary Travel.
There was one notable British rocket program, however. This program, led by Alwyn Crow, worked on developing cordite powered solid fuel rockets for weapons. This program was started on May of 1935, and had made significant advances by the summer of 36. In light of these advancements, the British army asked Crow to develop rockets for applications such as:
Anti-aircraft defense
Long range attacks
Air to air combat
Assisted takeoff for heavy bombers
For these assignments, the British rocket program perfected both 2 and 3 inch cordite rockets. There were also experiments done with 11-stick cordite motors. in 1939 another testing base was opened in Jamaica, as well as the existing one in Britain. These two together worked towards further develop rocket weapons.
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