The sun would never be able to set on the Union Jack -- if it flew on all the worlds of the solar system.
That's the premise of Ministry of Space, a new 3-part comic book history of a decidedly alternative space age coming from popular writer Warren Ellis and Image Comics in 2001.
Beginning at the close of World War 2, Ministry proposes that forces from Great Britain are the first to arrive at the site of Hitler's V-2 rocket program, where the seeds of modern rocketry were sown.
"So in the alternate history, someone in the Air Ministry arranges for Von Braun and his scientists to be pulled out of Peenemünde and the area carpet-bombed, before the Americans and the Russians can get there," Ellis told SPACE.com.
"They beat them to the punch, and they don't leave anything for the Americans or the Russians. The British don't leave anything behind, because the British were very, very good at carpet-bombing. Ask anyone who lived in Dresden."
Ellis, who's perhaps best known to American comics fans for his work on the uncompromising sci-fi/political series Transmetropolitan, has been fascinated with the space program his whole life. One of his earliest memories is of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The premature end of space exploration has bothered him nearly as long.
"To know that Werner Von Braun sat down in 1951 and designed a perfectly workable Mars mission . . . that only needed technology that had to mature for another 10 years or so from the point he wrote it to work. We could have actually colonized Mars in 1965."
This doesn't mean that the road to the stars will be smooth for the Ministry or its single-minded leader.
"The MacGuffin of the series is where this very determined young man in the Air Ministry gets the budget to do this. This guy independently invented the black budget, in order to create the Ministry of Space."
Like many of Ellis' protagonists, this visionary behind the Ministry is ferociously committed to his cause, leading him into questionable moral territory.
"As a fighter pilot [in WWII] . . . he has an experience where he saw the edge of space -- and could get no further," Ellis says.
"It imprinted on him . . . he's something of a dark dreamer, he's not entirely a good man, but he saw the edge of space. And is driven enough and yes, ruthless enough to actually make it happen."
The art for Ellis' vision comes from fellow Brit Chris Weston, who worked briefly on the Ellis-created The Authority for DC's WildStorm imprint, and on various issues of DC's Lucifer and The Invisibles.
Fight the Mekon
Ellis describes Weston, as an artist, as "somewhere between Glenn Fabry and Brian Bolland." Moreover, he says, "Chris is a huge space buff. And he, like me, remembers the old Dan Dare comic strip from the '50s."
The uniquely British, stiff-upper-lip "Dan Dare" vision of space travel was one of the seeds from which Ministry of Space grew.
"It was only two pages a week, Dan Dare," Ellis remembers. "Fully painted, lustrous, gorgeous thing. And in its way it was its own alternate history, because it was nominally the future, but all the characters were in Royal Air Force uniforms, and all the technology was rigidly extrapolated from 1950s technology. And it has this strange retro-future feel -- Arthur C. Clarke consulted on it for a while."
"But I wanted to go at it straight and find out what would happen if Dan Dare had been the way British history turned out."
