When Mrs. Gidby talks about her husband's bouts of depression, she refers to "when the black dog was on him". She is paraphrasing a famous remark made by Sir Winston Churchill, who struggled with bouts of despair all his life and called this struggle "the black dog of depression".
Discussing the Moon Landing with Bright, Thursday mentions the achievement of "Alcock and Brown, fifty years ago when I was a boy". The two-man transatlantic flight by John Alcock, a Mancunian, and Arthur Whitten Brown, a Scotsman of American parentage, did indeed take place in 1919, a half-century before the Moon Landing. They flew from Canada to Europe in less than 72 hours, a feat which had previously been considered impossible. Both men were knighted. Eight years later, the American Charles Lindbergh managed a solo flight from America to France in less than 34 hours.
Heavyside Studios and their Moon Rangers show clearly a nod to Gerry Anderson's Century21 TV shows such as Thunderbirds (1965) and Stingray (1964).
This episode includes references to the 1969 moon landing and features two characters named "Slayton", which was the last name of an original Mercury 7 astronaut, Deke Slayton.
Humbolt says to Drake at the party, "You might have made more of the part played by British know-how. No Tom Bacon, no fuel cells. No fuel cells, no moon." Francis Thomas Bacon (1904 - 1992), was an English engineer who developed the first practical hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell. Drake may have ignored him as he was a graduate of Cambridge University, not Oxford.