Rocketry Planet

LONDON, England UK — The British look at life with a different slant than the Yanks over in the United States, but British rocketeers agree with hobby rocketeers world-wide: Trust in Thrust.  The BBC show Top Gear show has bought into that mantra as well, and on a recent show displayed that to their viewers.

The premise was simple. Space travel costs a lot of money, so could Top Gear crack the budget nut by building a cheaper space rocket based on a car? Show hosts Richard and James went for the most rocket-shaped car they could find — a three-wheeled Reliant Robin, but from that point on, the Simplicity Fairies flew away and left them in a world of pain.

The first problem was due to their own ambition. James and Richard decided to build a space shuttle, which to them was the most complex kind of space craft imaginable, on account of it needing to be re-usable. This meant they'd have to build fuel tanks that detached, and find a way of flying a driverless automobile.

"If you're surprised from the pictures at how big the finished shuttle is, well, so were we."

On top of this they needed some formidable rocket power to get the thing off the ground, so they reunited with their old friends from the British Rocketry Association, the men who'd previously sent a Mini Cooper down a ski jump in the Top Gear Winter Olympics. After much scribbling, the rocket men announced the shuttle would need approximately eight tons of thrust — 12 times what the Mini had used, to take the shuttle to its test flight height of 3,000 feet.

Below is the Top Gear show preview and the actual launch video.  According to UK sources, the motors used for this promotion were supplied by Contrail Rockets.

UPDATE: The full show 19 minute video segment has been added at the bottom.

Reader comments:

#1

Certainly seems like an appropriate end, considering the motor company's cato at LDRS.

crontab on 02-18-2007 11:33 PM

#2 Bunch of Garbage

I watched the clip of the launch and that was a bunch of garbage. When was the last time a rocket that lawn-darted exploded like that? They had no intentions of that project succeeding. That car wasn't going to fly. They packed the fuel tank full of gas or some other flammable material and detonated it on impact to make for some good TV. What a load of crap.

DAllen on 02-19-2007 04:57 PM

#3

Quote:

They packed the fuel tank full of gas or some other flammable material and detonated it on impact to make for some good TV. What a load of crap.

Someone on r.m.r said they stepped through the video frame-by-frame and the explosion sequence was entered manually. What a show won't do for ratings...

crontab on 02-19-2007 06:07 PM

#4

the car was due to fly and the explosion is obviously added as an after effect, remember this is TV.

You can tell it was an after effect by the fact that non of the debri they show at the end is in any way burnt.

Also by the time it came back in there were only a few ceceroni motors left unlit, they wouldn't make a fireball.

Watch the video again and you'll see that it was an after effect for TV.

Cath

bfo on 02-20-2007 05:44 AM

#5

Quote:

Watch the video again and you'll see that it was an after effect for TV.

Yeah, I could tell that from watching the video of the show. But you know how rocketeers are—anything that could show rocketry in a bad light is enough to get their panties in a wad.

crontab on 02-20-2007 10:00 AM

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