Boyes-Dennison

Professor Boyes-Dennison was the creator of the impeller engine — described by the Doctor as an early form of reactionless drive, which humanity would only perfect two centuries later — that was used to create the three ships of the British Imperial Spacefleet, which were flown to the Moon in 1878. Their names were Cygnus, Lynx and Draco. His daughter was Emily Boyes-Dennison, who acted as his assistant more than his daughter ever since the death of her mother some years ago. While the professor was a genius, he had a short temper and an abrupt manner, and was privately frustrated at his inability to properly explain how the impeller engine worked; at least one person observed that it was as though the idea was clear in his mind but the English language was currently unable to properly express the terms he recalled.

He accompanied Captain Richard Haliwell and a group of soldiers to investigate the surface after finding civilisation. During their search, the team encountered the Fifth Doctor and Vislor Turlough, but while Boyes-Dennison accused them of being spies who had stolen his work, the Doctor assured them that they had come to the Moon via other methods, Emily pointing out to her father that spies wouldn't have introduced themselves so brazenly.

After the search team returned to their ships, Haliwell and Emily were captured by the natives, and the professor suffered a heart attack after witnessing his daughter's abduction, the Doctor unable to resuscitate him given the limited medical resources available. He was buried near the ships' landing-site, as they had no means of taking the body back to Earth, with Sinclair musing that the Moon was not an unfitting place for the professor to rest.

In the course of his time with the expedition, the Doctor determined that Boyes-Dennison had created the impeller engine after the Vrall were able to send an RNA-encoded spore of some sort to Earth with the necessary instructions to create one, explaining how Boyes-Dennison could have made such a massive technological leap on his own and still be unable to explain it to others. With his death and the near-calamity of the Vrall attack, the British space program was abandoned. (PROSE: Imperial Moon)