Why is the uk obsessed with rockets?

Phwoar, the power. Just imagine it: the pulsing, explosive power of a rocket launch. The sheer force. Tonnes of rigid metal, spewing fire, surging straight up, heading out into the final frontier. Very alpha.
Well, the Government wants some of that action. This week the Department for Transport published a draft Spaceflight Bill. It should allow spaceports to be built and satellites to be launched from British soil for the first time. All by 2020. Woof!
It's space-viagra for a flaccid, post-Brexit Britain. And it's the ultimate stimulant. Look at the euphoria that greeted Major Tim Peake's trip to the International Space Station.
Some 536 people (including Major Peake) have been to space, but his voyage, during which he watched the rugby and attended the BAFTAs, won wall-to-wall coverage. We liked it so much we're sending him back there for another go.
Why the extra-terrestrial jingoism? As part of the Government's bill, aviation minister Tariq Ahmad said: "We have never launched a spaceflight before from this country." You almost can hear the wistfulness in his voice.
Britain missed out on the space race - we were too poor, too grey, too small - and it's given us a complex. Bigger, more virile nations launched their rockets. So did France, even more humiliatingly. And now, a new generation of countries and private companies is making us feel inadequate all over again.
It shouldn't. Despite the lack of big, show-off launches, the UK has ended up with a thriving, modern space sector.
The performance anxiety is understandable; it's part of our history of decline. As the Second World War came to a close, the UK was just as keen as the US to get its hands on the Nazis' technological secrets. In particular, the V2 rocket, partly because it had terrorised London, but mainly because it held the key to the coming space age.
Allied soldiers and scientific advisers scouted ahead of the main advance, searching for documents and devices. But when they came across Mittelwerk - the underground V2 facility where thousands of slave labourers died building rockets - the Americans simply bullied the Brits and kept the V2s to themselves. Just 24 years later, they were on the moon, thanks to Wernher von Braun and his fellow Nazi scientists.
Meanwhile, our space programme was short-lived and based largely on the Isle of Wight, in Cowes. It culminated with the launch of a Blue Arrow rocket in Australia in 1971, carrying a satellite into space. The UK remains the only country to develop a satellite programme, then abandon it.
Despite that, though, the UK excels at space. We build advanced satellites in places like Stevenage and Surrey. Our scientific research opens up new fields. This was Tim Peake's contribution on the International Space Station: the science he did, not the fact he was British.
His voyage was possible because we're part of the European Space Agency, which landed a robotic spacecraft on a comet. One of the biggest satellite communications companies in the world, Inmarsat, is based on a roundabout in east London. All without the expense and bother of launching rockets ourselves.
Indeed, where the Isle of Wight failed, the Isle of Man succeeded. It focused not on rocket launches, but on space services - law, insurance, accounting. Not as sexy as a launch, but lucrative and much less risky. And the sort of thing the UK as a whole is very good at.
The Isle of Man did suffer some embarrassment, but only when it touted Manx space tourism and actual launches, with flights priced at £100m. A private company imported a 1980s Russian space station, then quietly shipped it off the island four years later.
There are better places to launch rockets than the UK: I have checked on a map and we're quite far away from the equator. (Launching satellites into polar orbits makes more geographic sense, but they aren't much use for communications satellites.) Nor do we need to launch rockets ourselves to make money from them.
Blasting off from spaceports is the status symbol of a bygone age. If we truly were a self-confident nation, we'd leave the willy-waving to others.