Rocket Fleet Amateur Rocketry My involvement in rocketry started at the end of the 1970's. The origins of my love of space actually started when I saw the first Moon landings on the TV as a sproglet, about a decade earlier, but it was not until the end of the 1970's, when I had outgrown my chemistry set, that my practical involvement started. I spent the next decade working in isolation trying (trying being the operative word) to build everything from rocket motors to ramjets. In fact, it was these early developments that got me my first brush with the media in 1983, first with the South Wales Echo, and then with TV-AM. The problem was, I spent rather more time building rockets and setting my bedroom on fire, than I did on studying, with predictable results, my school results were average, but I'd built some rather nice rocket injector heads. I learnt my lesson rather late, but luckily, not too late, hence the fact I managed to get my B.Sc and M.Sc degrees. In the early 1990's, I was involved in developing small scientific rocketry projects, one for a team who wanted a rocket system for depositing small ground stations on glaciers, and another for volcanic crater overflights. Hence my love for microspacecraft and landers. A couple of years later, at the start of 1993, I helped start up the Aspire Rocket Programme which grew out of the ASPIRE I Rocket Project which had been running previously for a couple of years. Work started on developing hybrid rocket motors in Aspire early in 1993, but by early 1998, with the focus having changed, I moved on from this organisation (which had by then changed its name to AspireSpace),and became involved in MARS due to their exciting space projects, and focus on practical development.