It's 60 years to the day that Britain launched its first Skylark rocket. It wasn't a big vehicle, and it didn't go to orbit. But the anniversary of that first flight from Woomera, Australia, should be celebrated because much of what we do in space today has its roots in this particular piece of technology.
Skylark was what is called a sounding rocket. It would go just fast enough and high enough - a few hundred kilometres - to gather new data on the upper atmosphere or to observe space and its unique environment. At the top of the rocket's parabola, for example, experiments would get a few minutes to sample what happens in weightlessness.
"The short timescales from proposing a Skylark mission to its launch - sometimes as little as two years - allowed new ideas and new technologies to be exploited on human timescales, and invoked a real sense of purpose and accomplishment.
"The downside was that the failure rate could be quite high. But the MSSL Director Prof Boyd (later Sir Robert Boyd) memorably said: 'If we are not suffering failures, we are not working at the edge, and if we are not working at the edge, we shouldn't be here'. It was more than career-forming; it was life-forming."
Having been enthusiastically supported at the outset, the programme eventually lost favour in Whitehall and the last motors came off the production line in 1994. That wasn't an immediate end for Skylark because enough components had been stockpiled that flights could be continued through to 2005. The very last mission, on 2 May that year, was recorded by the BBC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-41945654
All aboard the Skylark.
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