Alan Bond builds his first rockets as a teenager, inspired by the Dan Dare comic strip, and spends the rest of his career trying to get Britain into space. He works on the Blue Streak rocket program until government funding collapses, then pushes ahead with HOTOL, a single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft that runs into the same wall of bureaucracy and money. The film picks up the story as Bond teams with engineers Richard Varvill and John Scott-Scott to design Skylon, a reusable spaceplane built around a liquid hydrogen super-cooler engine developed at their company, Reaction Engines. Interviews trace the technical problem at the center of the project, cooling incoming air fast enough to make an air-breathing rocket engine work, and the Official Secrets Act restrictions that shadowed Bond's early government work. Rather than a triumphant launch, the film follows three engineers negotiating funding gaps and institutional skepticism over decades, using Bond's own account of Blue Streak, HOTOL, and Skylon to show how one design idea survived multiple failed programs.