On Sunday 21st September, an MEng project group successfully launched their rocket on the West Coast of Scotland.

Along with several other student teams, they joined the Scottish Aeronautics & Rocketry Association on their flying day at Fairlie Moor rocket site. The team have worked with John Arthur from the United Kingdom Rocketry Association (UKRA), who also joined them for the launch.

They had to radio in to Glasgow Airport’s Air Traffic Control Tower and were given a 30-minute launch window with a maximum height of 13,000 feet. It was a tense final 15 minutes after the motor initially failed to ignite, but with ten minutes to spare, they had lift off.

The rocket reached an altitude of 2.581 kilometres after climbing for 21.2 seconds, with a maximum acceleration of 21.7 G and a top speed of 373.1 m/s (Mach 1.1) during its ascent. After reaching its apogee (highest point), the rocket separated as intended and both parachutes were successfully ejected. The total flight time was 223.5 seconds.

The team got to watch the rocket’s main parachute as it descended and disappeared behind the crest of the Crosbie and Caldron hills, however the rocket had landed 920 metres away and was hidden in nettles, bushes, ditches and wet marshland – too far to recover in daylight, and meaning they had to abandon a second planned launch. The team took the decision that half the members would stay behind and miss their flight home.

The next morning, after some quick shopping for hiking gear, they set out to recover their rocket – finally finding it fully intact with minimal damage later that afternoon.

Team member Farhal Bashir said “I’m pleased to announce that the launch was a success. We are the only Queen Mary student group to have successfully designed, launched and recovered a high-power rocket from this high of an altitude.

In under a year, we went from never having built or even seen a rocket launch in-person before, to executing a flawless flight on our first attempt.

There were several points during this project where our group discussed and genuinely considered giving up on launching the rocket due to the many challenges we encountered along the way, but looking back now, I’m glad we didn’t.”

Their mentor from UKRA, John Arthur, was so impressed that he has encouraged the team to do more test flights and attempt some records – they plan to conduct one more launch using a J-Class motor with over twice the thrust in an attempt to break the current UK altitude record in this category.

Congratulations to the whole team: Farhal Bashir, Hamza Nabeel, Zaheerul Islam, Mujahed Haque, Alexander Howells, Neal Storhaug, and their project supervisors Dr Fariborz Motallebi and Dr Sergey Karabasov.