Been there, done that, got the spacesuit

As it’s the silly season, space is in the news (and of course everywhere else as even a rudimentary knowledge of quantum electrodynamics will tell you). Another US shuttle has a hole in its shields, NASA is gearing up to put a telescope on the dark side of the moon and plans are being drawn up for a one-star orbiting hotel. All this is a bit of yawn for the British.

It's not that we're against space as such – with HG Wells, Arthur C Clarke, Dan Dare, Dr Who and Hawkwind on our side, we’ve always considered space to be, well, ours.

Indeed if we’d been a little quicker off the mark in 1945 we could have had our own German rocket scientists, but at the time our leaders obviously felt that this would be cheating and left our space programme in the hands of the Ministry of Works, where it languished.

So, while our government concentrated on minutiae such as rebuilding our bombed-out cities and dismantling our Empire, other forces were obliged to take on the cosmos. While we haven't bothered with anything as flashy as a moon programme, we've had a space station in orbit for years.

Launched discreetly from a water-meadow on the country estate of the British Interplanetary Society, and protected by Klingon cloaking technology, our space station is positioned in a relaxing orbit which brings it over Buckingham Palace every Wednesday afternoon at tea time.

Unlike the International Space Station, which comes across as a random collection of corrugated iron sheds rag-bolted to a pair of windmills, Her Majesty's Space Station Indomitable is from an original idea by Sir Christopher Wren.

Of course there have had to be compromises along the way, but fans of British colloquial architecture will revel in the detail – the shuttle-bay, for example, is thatched.

Whereas in the ISS the astronauts spend all their time either conducting worthy experiments, huddling in tin boxes during power cuts or welding on additional Meccano, aboard HMSS Indomitable it's more or less what you'd expect from the British.

There's an oak-panelled 'drawing room with plenty of space for the dogs, a billiard room and a library opening onto a terrace overlooking the orangery. The saloon bar is staffed by secondment from Claridge’s and the milkman calls on Mondays.

Crew and guests are forbidden to fire upon the ISS as it clanks round in the slow lane and after a tour of duty they normally have to be brought back to Earth by force. Earlier this year a mission was sent up by the National Space Centre to repaint the logo in a serif typeface.

Of course when Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic takes over the shuttle franchise his PR people will generate rather more media coverage, but having our brilliant achievements forced out into the open is one of our key communication strategies. Don’t even ask about our time machine, our wormhole cruiser or our immortality patches.