T minus 13 seconds …

I had a real surprise this week when communicating with an old school friend. He had some pictures I never even knew existed that were taken coming up to 30 years ago.

They are of a space shuttle model that I carved out of balsa wood, painted and then stuffed with parts of dismantled fireworks. It is then apparent from the photographs that we built a metal gantry out of Meccano to hold the shuttle in position and launched it from a friend’s back garden on Friday 12th November 1982 – (which incidentally was the day after the real shuttle programme’s first operational flight when Columbia carried four astronauts and deployed a satellite for the first time)

If I remember rightly, I had created a secondary fuse mechanism that would ignite after take-off which was then designed to blast open the payload doors and release a parachute to enable the shuttle to float back to the ground.

These days we would have captured such teenage experiments on video and posted them to YouTube – as it is I am staggered that this event was even captured on a couple of grainy photographs as I don’t remember any of us using cameras much at all, let alone actually bothering to get the pictures developed.

What happened after the ‘main engine ignition’ is a little hazy but I seem to remember the shuttle flying upwards for a bit then becoming unstable and crashing. After hitting the ground, the subsequent parachute release explosion was a little bit larger than expected and resulted in the model burning rapidly to a cinder 😦

As that classic line from the Italian Job goes – it was “only supposed to blow the bloody doors off” 😉