SOUTHERN QUEENSLAND, Australia — The space race has started again. There's currently a prize of $20 million up for grabs to the first person to fly a rocket to the moon and use a robotic vehicle to complete several missions.

A local group of young rocketeers has a head start on many of us. Toowoomba's Space Pilots club.

"I think it brings out the child in all of us" says Barry Whisson, the Launch Controller, "and that's a good thing."

For a small cylinder of plastic and balsa wood, the small rockets sure pack a punch, "we've had rockets go up to fifteen hundred feet today. We have permission to fly up to two thousand feet. It's a matter of the engines, they're a solid fuel rocket engine we use. In the old scale, three inches long, or about seventy five millimetres long. Remember the days of Guy Fawkes and the model rockets? These are more sophisticated, but they effectively do the same thing. On the front end of the rocket there is a nose cone, and the second charge from the engine pushes the nose cone out and down the rocket floats with either a streamer or a parachute. We've had rockets that have been launched forty or fifty times."

"Most of the boys build the rockets from a kit. Strictly speaking there's as little or as much effort as you want to put into it. You can get kits from $10 to $20, which is not big money these days. They're mainly made of cardboard, balsa and plastic. So long as they learn the basics of flight, and the basics of eye-hand co-ordination to glue things together correctly, it's a fairly easy project, even for kids as young as seven or eight. They do learn the basics of rocket building, the basics of aerodynamics, the basics of painting, so there's many things that come into play there", says Barry.

After all those hours of learning and building and gluing, it's all over in usually less than a minute, "once the rocket leaves the pad it's probably all over in half a minute, it's most exciting... I'd just like to go into the mind of a kid as he pushes that button and looks up in awe as that rocket shoots up off the pad with a great whoosh".

"I'm of an age where we absolutely thrilled at what happened in the late sixties and early seventies with the moon. Of course we thought 'what a lot of money to spend in getting a man on the moon'. But a lot of things have flowed from it, a lot of advancements in society. And of course now we're looking at returning to the moon which is fantastic. And going onto Mars. Who know, in a few hundred years time we might be going right around our solar system. I think Space Pilots is a terrific start. I'd like to think that maybe one day one of our Space Pilots today will actually be walking on the moon. I think this is an exciting age we're coming into."

One young Space Pilot is Josh, who has plans to follow his rocket into space, "it's very exciting, I'm hoping that I'll be able to launch rockets, or be in the rocket when it goes up to the moon, to become an astronaut".

Copyright © 2007, Australian Broadcasting Corporation.