British Interplanetary Society
BIS logo
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| Abbreviation | BIS |
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| Motto | From imagination to reality |
| Formation | 1933 |
| Legal status | Non-profit organisation |
| Purpose | UK space advocacy, promotion of astronautics research |
| Location |
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Region served
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UK |
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Membership
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UK astronautical engineers |
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President
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Mark Hempsell |
| Affiliations | International Astronautical Federation |
| Website | BIS |
The British Interplanetary Society (BIS), founded in Liverpool in 1933 by Philip E. Cleator, is the oldest space advocacy organisation in the world. Its aim is exclusively to support and promote astronautics and space exploration.
It is a non-profit organisation with headquarters in London and is financed by members' contributions. BIS publishes the academic journal Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and the magazine Spaceflight.
It is situated on South Lambeth Road (A203) near Vauxhall station, and not far from the Secret Intelligence Service building.
The BIS was preceded by the American Interplanetary Society (founded 1930), the German VfR, and Soviet rocket research groups, but unlike these it never became absorbed into a national industry.
When originally formed in January 1933, the BIS aimed not only to promote and raise the public profile of astronautics, but also to undertake practical experimentation into rocketry along similar lines to the organisations above. However early in 1936, the Society discovered that this ambition was thwarted by the Explosives Act of 1875, which prevented any private testing of liquid-fuel rockets in the United Kingdom.
In the late 1930s, the group devised a project of landing people on the Moon by a multistage rocket, each stage of which would have many narrow solid-fuel rockets. Their lander was gumdrop-shaped but otherwise quite like the Lunar Module. As it was considered that the cabin would have to rotate to provide artificial gravity by centrifugal force, the BIS is considered to have invented the first instrument for space travel — a navigation mechanism which would cancel out the rotating view.
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