The sport of Queens: After the sun came out, horse racing lover and racehorse breeder, Her Majesty the Queen, was seen admiring the form of Camelot who had just won the Epsom Derby. Courtesy: Ascend/David Todd
Having already done 60 years good service, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II further did her duty and attended the four major days of the celebration of her Diamond Jubilee, through sun, wind and rain (well mainly the latter two).
While the BBC had its television coverage much criticised for being celebrity-ridden and ill-informed (including one commentator at the Thames river boat pageant who even demoted the Queen to “Her Royal Highness”), all in all, the Jubilee events: the Derby race meeting, the river pageant, the music concert and the final thanksgiving service, procession and Buckingham Palace salute/fly-pass, were rated as being very successful.
The television and satellite companies, of course, were major beneficiaries as high definition television (HDTV) pictures were beamed around the world. Even with digital compression technologies, renting out transponders for this bandwidth-hungry application remains a major revenue earner for commercial satellite operators. They now look forward to the European football championship and to the Olympics. .
This writer discovered one other benefit of HDTV. Instead of getting cold and wet looking at the river Thames as the Queen had to do, he could use a pair of close-focusing 8×20 binoculars to get a closer view of famous Dunkirk little ships even if the BBC TV cameramen stayed back. The HDTV images held up rather well and it was almost as if you were there…even if it was not quite as good as really experiencing the atmospheric buzz of the crowd at such an event.
Flightglobal/Ascend’s Space Team would like to pay tribute to Her Majesty in whose 60 year reign she has witnessed all of mankind’s orbital spaceflight achievements including Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit and Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon. The Queen even met both space travellers on their visits to London after their respective returns to Earth. As such, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, will always be the spaceage Queen.
