We have liftoff: the rocket enthusiasts having a blast in Scotland

Once a year, enthusiasts converge on a wet and windy moor in Scotland to launch homemade rockets that can reach heights of 15,000 feet. It's quite a blastThere's time. There's space time. And then there's rocket time. For John Bonsor – or Rocket Man, as he's often called in his home village of Glengarnock in Ayrshire – rocket time is the moments after a launch. "Time slows down," he says. "Each flight may last only a matter of seconds, but each second feels stretched out to a minute. Every detail of the flight is fixed in my mind: the fin that isn't keeping the rocket on track, the motor that cuts out fractionally early. Everything."For me, rocket time means something a little different. It means looking out of the window of an outbuilding at Lapwing Lodge, a former tuberculosis hospital 20 miles west of Glasgow, where a couple of dozen people, mostly men, have gathered for International Rocket Week (IRW), wondering if the wind and rain will relent in time for anyone to launch a rocket. "You do need a lot of patience for this," Bonsor says. He's not wrong.Bonsor is more than a rocket enthusiast; he's an obsessive. He's now 62, and has lived and breathed rockets ever since the first satellites were launched in the 1950s. His flat is almost buried under rocketry. His bedroom is piled high with more than 50 rockets in various stages of repair, and you can barely see his bed; the walls are covered with rocket charts. There is, literally, no ...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: The Guardian Hobbies Engineering Technology Features Life and style Science Source Type: news