Every year for a week in August, a group of amateur rocketeers convene at the Fairlie Moor Rocket Site, not far from Glasgow, to blast their DIY shuttles and spaceships into the skies. This is International Rocket Week and VICE were there for the 29th annual event to get an insight into the expertise and passion of the amateur rocketeer community.Attendees talked us through the effort that goes into building their models as we witness their launches, and Peter Stewart, one of the founders of the local Paisley Rocketeers in 1935, recalls how rocketry has changed through time.John Bonsor – the organiser of IRW – explains how amateurs can still play a role in space exploration, whether it’s designing spacecraft for novel applications or experimenting with hybrid engines, as he showed us some of the hundreds of model rockets in his own home. “Over the years I must have seen thousands and thousands of model and amateur rocket launches, but I enjoy every single one of them,” Bonsor said. “There’s something about them, I don’t know what it is, it’s difficult to describe. It just sort of grabs my soul, really.”