 Now, Len, I joined this department in my last space science laboratory 16 years ago. You were director of the department and I was your last PhD student, but I distinctly remember coming here and realizing that there was a hidden story to be told. So, Len, now I have this opportunity to ask you, what happened to create the space program in the UK? Well, I think it's fair to say the prime mover was Harry Massey, who had a strong desire to explore upwards and outwards, namely the earth's atmosphere and what lay beyond. And Harry Massey was able to be very influential and play the major role because he was involved in the Royal Society, and in particular in the Gassio committee and the subcommittee of the Gassio committee, which had already began looking at rockets. How important was that? Well, I think crucial at the time the funding support for this new line of activity was directed through the Royal Society and Massey had the principal role within society in guiding this research and in spending the money in various university departments in the UK. Now, Harry Massey was based at UCL at the time, hence the link to this department, but it was Robert Boyd, who was the most important perhaps in your career. What was it that drew you into space science? Well, absolutely. I, of course, grew up in Ireland and did a first degree in Dublin, and Robert Boyd came to give a seminar at Trinity Dublin, went to that and was just hugely impressed. I had not been exposed to the nascent space sciences before, but here it all was. And the Skylark rocket was absolutely fundamental to the work that you were doing. So, tell me a bit about really how important that was and what you were able to do with that rocket? Well, it served a very wide range of disciplines. I mean, my own two disciplines, observing x-rays from the Sun and cosmic ones from the universe, it went to a height of 800 kilometres or so above Earth's surface, typically remained above the sensible atmosphere for seven plus minutes. So, you could do astronomy during the seven minutes or while passing through the atmosphere, you observed the nature of Earth's atmosphere and studied that. Now, this piece of kit here actually is typical of the sort of instrumentation that you launched on Skylark, very, very small and with quite a primitive purpose. Tell me about this. Well, its purpose was to register x-ray emission from the Sun, but it's extremely simple. Underneath the faceplate there are a lot of little filters, all transmitting different energies of x-ray, but very crude because, of course, it was simply mounted on a rocket which was spinning, but not accurately pointed. So, you just hoped that on one or more of the rotations, this actually went past the Sun and got some x-rays. It did quite often. So, tell me about some of the more exciting projects that you were working on, for example, the Copernicus mission. Well, that came a little later. We were invited to propose an x-ray light collector, reflecting light collector for this large NASA spacecraft. And you published what you found, of course, in the Royal Society's Proceedings. Absolutely, yes. We have the bound book here. So, this is studies of the x-ray mission from supernova remnants. Tell me a bit about what you found. Well, Copernicus allowed the separation of different parts of an extended source, which hadn't been possible previously. And so, we were able to deduce the structure of the x-ray mission from the source. And I guess the rather novel thing was prior to this sort of observation, an object like the Crab Nebula was well known to emit x-rays. That's probably the most famous supernova remnants. Indeed, but they generally came from very high-energy electrons acting within a magnetic field. This showed quite a different style of x-ray mission, because following the big explosion of the supernova, shock travels out into the interstellar medium, sweeps up, and heats interstellar gas. And so, after some tens of thousands of years, the gas is extended enough and hot enough to emit copious x-radiation. It's interesting to me that not only the origins of the UK space program are a secret to most people, but also the impact on our economy is not very well known either. I mean, the space sector as a whole now, academic and commercial, really makes a difference for our country. Well, absolutely. The space industrial sector currently worth 9.1 billion, that UK had an early privileged position in space science through association with NASA, later in founding ESA. It began and got rolling the space science, which in turn led to research students graduating, but of course, not necessarily continuing in the specialist scientists, but spinning out into what then became the space industry that we have today. So, from an activity that may have seemed frivolous in austerity Britain after the Second World War, we today have this industry that is absolutely fundamental to our economy. Yes, and to be entirely fair, of course, it wasn't put together precisely to create a 9 billion industry. And it's a real argument for funding, fundamental research, because you just don't know what's going to come out of it. Exactly. No one can prophesy what may be the ultimate or total outcome of sounding space with skylarks, but it is clear that the more man knows about his environment, the more likely it is that the vast forces of nature will be honest to his advantage.