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rocketry: event reports: tomorrow's world rocketry challenge
The rocket challenge was a unique event in UK rocket History. Never before had any teams come together to fly rockets with a sole aim of breaking the UK altitude record. All previous attempts have been made by either a team or a lone individual and there has never been any sort of challenge. Before the event the record was 14,006 feet, this altitude was set by Ben Jarvis of MARS in 1998 at LDRS 18 in the US. In the early part of 1999 Hugh Gemmell of the Sheffield Rocketry Association (SRA) flew his PML Thunder & Lightning to over 10,000 feet in Linconshire. This was the highest flight in the UK by a UK rocketeer, but didn't break the all out altitude record. A week later MARS built and flew a scratch built two stage rocket from the same launch site to around 13,000 feet. They had trouble downloading the information from their altimeter and not knowing the true altitiude they achieved were reluctant to claim a new record without knowing the exact figure. A number of team expressed an interest in building and flying altitude rockets and when the BBC approached MARS in January of this year the rocket challenge was born. As it transpired only three teams entered, the current holders MARS, Hugh Gemmell from the SRA and Rob O'Brian from the West Lancs. Rocketry Society. I've split my report up into two sections, Friday night and Saturday. This is becasue there is quite a lot of text and doing it this way will result ineasier to read pages. Hopefully this has got the ball rolling and I know for a fact that at least two of the teams are working on their next evolution of rockets as are a number of other groups. This should see the altitude record pushed even higher by the end of the year. You never know, I might even give it a shot...
press coverage
The event generated quite a lot of interest in the media. The Daily Telegraph were sponsoring the Tomorrow's World Live Lab event in some way and they sent a reporter and a photographer alogn to record the event. They published an article in both their online papaer and their traditional print paper, the articles are the same however, the print version has two extra photographs. The BBC brought along a load of cameras including a 500 fps slow motion camera that caught some amazing footage. All of the footage they did take was editied and included as two segments that weer aired during the Live Lab programme. All in all the press coverage was excellent and I think it's done a lot to show UK rocketry in a good light.
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