Number of objects launched into orbit by country, both cumulative and annual:

1. USA

2. Russia

3. China

4. Britain

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-number-of-obje...

Not bad for a small country that's never been involved in a space race and which stopped trying to be a global Great Power before the space age even started.

I'm from Britain and can't think of anyone I know who has a chip on their shoulder about technology, largely because most of us either went to work for successful American firms the moment we graduated, or in the case of my brother, made a successful tech startup, grew it to be a profitable business and then sold it for a large sum of money (to the Americans again). Many of us have managed to achieve great life success by taking part in the tech industry, and were rewarded with small ownership stakes in those firms as a result. The fact that we didn't found those companies is a pity and a genuine source of relative weakness, but the reality is that the internet makes for global markets in which for any given product category there can only be a few winners. People can't really handle more than about four or five brands vying for attention simultaneously, which means it's just not mentally possible for every country to have a successful tech company in every category. The places that managed to grow competitors to the big US success stories all relied on either language barriers or government interference.

As for the rest, note that the USA is holding onto chip manufacture by its fingernails right now, an obsession with green tech is exactly the reason there aren't many AI datacenters in the UK to begin with, and Britain birthed one of the world's top AI labs. Yes, owned by Google because only great powers can invest the sums required, but that's OK. The collaboration between Britain and America on AI has been superb nonetheless.

Don't get me wrong. The UK is in a terrible state right now, the result of decades of leftward drift after the 1980s that consistently prioritized everything except economic success. Just turning around the Titanic would take years even if the process were to start tomorrow, which it won't, and the cultural gap is real. But there are still some strong foundations there. A whole generation of Brits have learned what great companies look like by working for the Americans. That's not reflected in their politics yet because politics is in both countries dominated by the old, and currently revolves around the issue of mass immigration. Economic success is on the backburner for now. But it'll come back. And when it does, there will be people who are ready to lead.