Meet Scotland's DIY Rocketeers

There aren't many places you can conveniently launch a homemade rocket. But a blustery Scottish moor, reachable only by winding roads that twist around reservoirs, wind turbines, and plenty of sheep, is one of them.

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.

The action all starts at nearby Lapwing Lodge Outdoor Centre, which serves as the enthusiasts' base camp. Here, the rocketeers design and build their latest models, and fix old favourites damaged by their latest flight. The rockets range from small projectiles made of repurposed sweet boxes to sleek missiles capable of reaching heights up to 15,000 feet (4,500m).

While one attendee paints blue glitter onto a cardboard tube just a few inches long, another examines the carbon fibre fins on a rocket he claims could break the sound barrier. Still others are hunched over painstakingly detailed sci-fi or NASA replicas.

But all the rockets have to share a few features if they want to fly. In one corner of the makeshift base camp, the father-son team behind UK model rocket supplier Rockets and Things sell supplies, from nose cones and parachutes to motors in a range of sizes. To buy motors beyond a certain grade, rocketeers need to have passed various levels of certification to prove they're capable of flying safely.

Some rocketeers experiment with payloads—keyfob cameras are popular to record a rocket's-eye view of the flight, and personal alarms are another favourite. The noise helps to locate the rocket when it falls back to Earth somewhere in the moor's expanse of long grass.

Over at the launch site, the rockets are lined up and ready to launch at the touch of a bright red button. John Bonsor, the organiser of International Rocket Week, calls air traffic control and the next rocketeers have a window of time to launch.

Throughout the week, the group collectively launches hundreds of rockets, but the lift-off moment doesn't get boring. Zooming off the launchpad, hopefully vertically, the rockets soon become dots in the distance, leaving a plume of smoke in their wake.

It doesn't always go to plan. Parachutes fail to deploy, leaving the models to the mercy of the (thankfully soft) ground. Rockets veer off course, wandering perilously close to the nearby reservoir and even closer car park. At the end of the week, a veteran Thunderbird 3 is tossed on the celebratory bonfire after a particularly brutal landing.

We visited the 29th annual International Rocket Week 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. Peter Stewart, one of the founders of the local Paisley Rocketeers in 1935, recalls how rocketry has changed over the years.

And John Bonsor explained 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."