The Decline of Engineering in Britain

On one of many avenues where we are falling behind

In the United States, where do aspiring engineers dream of working?

SpaceX.

In the United Kingdom, where do aspiring engineers dream of working?

Redbull Formula 1 Team.

What is the difference between these two? Have a little think about it.

The difference is that SpaceX creates real value in the world. They are pushing the frontier. They have already revolutionised the space industry (for a relatively tiny amount of money) and will keep doing so with Starship. By the end of the decade they may well be on Mars and have a monopoly on medium to large launches. Musk has executed so well the costs of spaceflight are changing by literal orders of magnitude. It is truly magnificent what him and his team have managed to do.

Smart engineers and engineering students in the US know this. They know that Musk is making engineering cool again. It’s clear many of the engineering¹ cream of the crop end up there at some point during their careers.

Conversely, let’s look at the United Kingdom.

The UK is home to 7 out of 10 competing Formula 1 teams. Each one spends around 140 million dollars per year (this used to be obscenely higher before budget caps were introduced in 2021). Bringing us to a total of around a billion dollars. What does one get for a billion dollars of engineering? Well, some bloody fast cars!

But while they are cool and exciting and marvels of engineering and whatnot, they hardly produce innovative value, and it is effectively zero compared to SpaceX. Now you can stretch things and say “the hybrid technology is helping roadcars” but for a billion dollars a year a list like this is reprehensible.

Their real value comes in the form of entertainment for millions of viewers and the 20 people who drive them, but it doesn’t exactly excuse the exorbitant cost.

A little pet theory I have is that if you made the cars half as fast, then ~90% of TV viewers would not care. TV already makes the cars appear slower than they are. Most viewers are more interested in the drivers and the celebrity drama, which actually is more entertaining than what happens on track! Only in person viewership would suffer which is a fraction of the total. You could even keep the cars at their extreme speeds for a pretty low cost by reducing the complexity of the regulation (and you would even get some wacky innovations like the fan car).

Nonetheless, this is where engineering students in the UK want to go. There are entire courses, at highly regarded universities, called “motorsports engineering”. At my university, there are around 50 masters degree students in the engineering department (mechanical, mechatronic, and electrical). 20 will work on Formula Student, by far the most time consuming project at university, where they build a car and race against other schools. And most years they can’t even race it because it breaks!

Students want to go work at these places because they are seen as the coolest engineering roles you can get in this country. They are ultra-competitive and the pay is accordingly low. If you work at a Formula 1 team, you will probably end up optimising some component’s weight to shave off a tenth of a gram, or running CFD simulations of a tennis ball sized part. Interesting work if you’re solving a real life problem, like making the Curiosity Rover light enough to go to Mars or a rocket’s aerodynamic profile survivable at Mach 25. Not if you’re making a car go 0.001% faster!²

Of course, expectations play into this as well. Formula 1, seen through the eyes of the general population, is “the cool engineering thing this country does”. So working for a team is an instant status boost to which nothing else really compares. Startup founder? Eh. Medical device designer? Ok whatever. But Formula 1 team! Woah mate, that's cool!³

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The UK has been in decline since the end of World War II. As Dean Acheson famously quipped, Britain had "lost an empire, and failed to find a role”. This role could have been scientific/engineering advancement and education, two natural strong suits. It was a possibility. But via a steady elimination of physical innovation, this country has found itself almost entirely as a service economy and not in control of its own destiny; we are a nation of bankers and lawyers. Did you know that the UK used to have an orbital rocket program? No longer. The bottom of the wikipedia page is particularly depressing to read…

The programme was cancelled on economic grounds, as the Ministry of Defence decided that it would be cheaper to use the American Scout rocket, which had a similar payload capacity, for future launches. Prior to the cancellation of Black Arrow, NASA had offered to launch British payloads for free; however, this offer was withdrawn following the decision to cancel Black Arrow.

As of 2023, the United Kingdom is the only country to have successfully developed and then abandoned a satellite launch capability. All other countries that have developed such a capability have retained it either through their own space programme or, in the case of France, through its involvement in the Ariane programme.

Pathetic.

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I recently went to the ophthalmologist to get some new glasses. He was quite chatty, and we got to talking about my degree and engineering in general. He told me about how the UK, back in the days of the empire, used to ship over gigantic, complex looms to India to produce fabric. These machines, marvels of engineering, are still around today. And apparently they still work, and still make fabric.

This was the quality we used to produce. Can we still?

One of the keys⁴ would be somehow switching the stream of top engineering talent away from Formula 1 and into a SpaceX-like entity. To do that we need a generational talent, a Musk or Altman to inspire a team who build something great. Something that brings this country out of the fog. That breaks the culture of stagnation. Is it possible?

Only one way to find out.

1. When I talk about engineers and engineering I mean hardware NOT software. Atoms not bits.

2. Calculated by assuming an employee shaves off 1/1000 of a second, and letting the total lap time be 100 seconds.

3. Something I’ve noticed: people outside London are much more interested in F1 than anyone living in London. So what is the status symbol of (non-software) engineering in London? There isn’t one!

4. The others are a story for another time.