And you thought Dover was the only place in England with chalk white cliffs? :D

The Needles, an array of chalk stacks jutting out of the English Channel away from the Isle of Wight’s western-most shoreline, have long since become icons of the isle. After the ickle dumpy lighthouse on the end of the Needles went up in the late 1850s (those the automated computers and helipad were added later :P), the area was initially employed for military purposes – with several gun batteries blasted into the cliffsides and slapped atop the headland in the 1860s to protect against potential naval (read French) invasion – the Needles is now a big tourist attraction for the island, and the area boasts a traditional theme park, boat tours around the cliffs, and a chair lift from the cliffs down to the beach. The shaking and creaking and complete lack of safety precautions is fun, honest! ;-p

Part of the Needles military operations included use for testing Britain’s missile program, which later became part of the UK’s civilian space program. Far removed from where somebody important might be inconvenienced, a new network of tunnels and rooms was built in the 1950s to accommodate testing facilities for ballistic missiles and later space rockets, starting with Blue Streak (a colossal blunder) and later moving on to the Black Knight (wildly successful) and Black Arrow (kinda successful, later abandoned) projects before their termination in the early 1970s. To this day, the UK remains the only country in the world to have successfully developed satellite launch capability, and then given it up. You may be thinking why this was the case. Well, with open conflict in Northern Ireland, British companies going bankrupt left, right, and centre, and inflation nearing double digits, it perhaps seemed odd for the government of the day to be pouring millions into a space program.

Hope you enjoy!