"I built rockets throughout the house: living room, dining room …" | Science

TThe shutters stand out in a workshop located in an industrial area of ​​Greater Manchester. A bright spring light is introduced. White cones and tubular structures rest on the sides, next to steps and buckets of paint. Nearby units are home to a sports nutrition company, an NHS wheelchair depot and a building contractor, but Lot # 7 is where Steve Bennett builds the rockets.

Long before Richard Branson or Elon Musk entered the new space race, Bennett and a small team, mostly volunteers, were working to make affordable suborbital commercial flights more accessible. a real possibility. Over the last 20 years, with a fraction of the budget of their rivals, they launched about twenty rockets to prepare their first manned flight.

Nova 2 is their latest project, a 12-meter rocket that, he hopes, will take pbadengers into space. The rocket engines burn for about 70 seconds. A capsule disconnects from the rocket and continues to climb higher. The pbadengers of the capsule will experience zero gravity and will see the curvature of the Earth and the darkness of the space. The capsule will then be in the atmosphere before safely parachuting. "You will become an astronaut for a few minutes," Bennett said.

His dreams of space, like those of so many others, began with moon landings. In fact, he was not allowed to watch them – not live, at least. He grew up in Dukinfielde in Greater Manchester. In 1969, his father was working as a truck driver and his mother, who worked at a gas station, saw no reason for a five-year-old boy to stay up until 3 am. It was not important, the prospect was sufficient. "I was more excited than anyone I knew," he says. "We had no idea what we would find up there."

While most of the childhood ambitions of becoming an astronaut fail, Bennett intensifies as he gets older. At the age of 12, he opened an account with a local chemist who supplies equipment to schools. He asked for a catalog, described the substances he wanted and skipped lunch for the next two weeks to pay for them. Teachers who recognized his scientific abilities tried to move away from the pyrotechnics, but without success. His teens were characterized by experiments with explosives: homemade rockets plunging his nose into freshly hung linen; nights in the parks entertaining friends with failed attempts.

Once out of school, he spent three years in the military, then got married and found himself a lab technician at the Colgate plant in Salford, where he tested soaps and toothpastes. It was around this time that he started to splash around in the rockets again. "I built them all over the house," he recalls. "Living room dining room, I have a great picture of a rocket going up the stairs with my son Max, who is three or four years old, stands next to him, completely unconscious."

In 1992, he decided to quit his job and focus solely on space travel. He created Starchaser Industries with the ultimate goal of sending paying customers in the space. At about the same time, the University of Salford contacted him to ask him if he could help her with a curriculum that she was developing with a space element. He was offered a laboratory, a budget and a place to store his rockets outside the family home. This was the first step towards professionalisation of the operation.

Since then, Starchaser has launched countless rockets – some successful, some not. In 2001, he launched Nova 1 from Morecambe Bay, Lancashire. From a height of 11 meters, it was the largest rocket ever launched from British soil. In 2017, she launched the 8.3-meter tall Skybolt 2 at the rear of a converted truck at Otterburn, a village in Northumberland, making it the largest operational rocket in the UK at that time. Between these prestigious moments, years of research have been conducted, particularly on the development of hybrid engines and pioneering safety systems. Bennett talks about his achievements with the robustness of an engineer rather than the size of an astronaut – less pbadionate about stars and galaxies than combustible substances and heat-resistant metals.

The next step is the launch of Nova 2. Until now, the capsule has been dropped from the back of an aircraft with a pilot on board, who has directed it to the ground . Bennett now wants to simulate an abortion situation, by testing a launching exhaust system that, in his opinion, will make the rocket much safer than its competitors: way to test crewed flights are resources. "If someone gave me 10 million pounds, I could do it in 36 months," he says. "So, if one of your readers has won the lottery recently …"

Since Richard Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004, the private travel industry has grown considerably. To date, Elon Musk's SpaceX has mobilized $ 2.4 billion from investors. Since 2016, Amazon's Jeff Bezos has sold $ 1 billion worth of Amazon shares each year to fund its Blue Origin space tourism project. Starchaser, for its part, had to rely on both financial sponsors, material donations and – as Bennett says – on "friends of friends". In addition to supporting the universities of Salford and Chester, he also received a series of donations from a telecommunications contractor in exchange for two spots for the first commercial flight.

Bennett admits that it has sometimes been frustrating to watch the "new race for space" take place among the super rich. "I'll tell you what hurts," he says. "I think if we had more money, we would get there faster. They are some of the richest people on the planet and they still do not. You think, "Why? Is it an impossible thing to do?

He makes comparisons between the new race to space and the advent of aviation in the late nineteenth century. First, there was the "stall phase", experiments on flying machines that have had varying success. Then the escape was under control, but it was the exclusive pursuit of the rich. Bennett believes that commercial spaceflight is in transition between these two phases; the next few years will see tourists leave Earth, but they will probably be all millionaires. This is what drives him the most after a trip to space, safe and affordable for everyone.

Bennett has come to view his lack of wealth as an opportunity to inspire a community-driven vision for the future of space travel. "I want to share that with as many people as possible," he says. "If there are people who want to volunteer, fly in the rocket, be part of the tests, that's the goal. I can not do this alone. "

The question of whether Great Britain cares is another question. Compared to the United States or Russia, the UK's relationship with space has always been cautious. The post-Second World War government played a leading role in the space race and in 1975 contributed to the creation of the European Space Agency. But in 1988, Kenneth Clarke, then Minister of Trade and Industry, called ESA's projects "crazy in the sky" and reduced funds. While the UK space industry's annual revenue was £ 14.8 billion in 2017, broadcasting accounted for 51%, with space observation accounting for only 3%.

However, Bennett remains confident that the general public is interested. He cites a market study by Starchaser that indicates that 70% of people would accept the opportunity to travel in space. He also mentions the enormous popularity of Starchaser's Space4Schools educational program, in which the company organizes rocket tours in schools across the country.

Visits to school "pay bills", but they are also essential to Starchaser's legacy. The solar system, says Bennett, will be critical to human survival in the face of climate change. It is therefore essential to inspire the next generation of rocket scientists. "The first person to land on Mars is still alive and is probably in school," he says. "If this person would turn around and say," I'm inspired because this crazy guy came into my school with a rocket, "well, that would be fantastic.